The new government’s focus is firmly on fixing the NHS, increasing productivity by 2 per cent year-on-year, reducing the current repairs backlog of just under £13.8bn and creating a step change in the NHS’s overall capital budget through a £3.1bn increase for 2024-2025. It is therefore of utmost importance to spend the additional capital departmental expenditure limit secured in the autumn statement wisely and efficiently.
Sponsored and written by
The more value for money, carbon, and capital savings that can be generated at the outset of any NHS capital project, the greater the ability to reinvest these savings into further projects, which can enhance clinical services or be redirected to patient care rather than buildings.
Moreover, all NHS capital projects must comply with legally binding net zero requirements, as established in the NHS Net Zero Building Standard, ensuring both embodied and operational carbon targets are met. These requirements are crucial not only for reducing long-term costs but also for meeting legal and environmental obligations, which include setting upfront carbon limits and adhering to decarbonisation pathways from the early stages of project planning.
NHS project directors frequently find themselves leading complex building designs that must balance multiple, sometimes competing, clinical and estates priorities. As each priority requires its own attention, it can lead to decisions being made in isolation. While difficult to avoid, this isolation can store up issues for later in the development cycle and may ultimately compromise the project’s overall cost-effectiveness and quality.
Optimising project design and delivery
This is why it is important to bring together a multidisciplinary, multi-objective optimisation process at the earliest stages of any project. Daisy is a data-driven computational tool developed by WSP which optimises early-stage building design through parametric design and AI machine learning, allowing thousands of potential building designs to be compared and assessed simultaneously, all in a very short space of time.
As Daisy continues to evolve, our goal is for NHS project directors to be able to input and prioritise all clinical and estate requirements at the earliest stages of the design process. We are working towards enabling Daisy to generate a comprehensive set of design options, appraising each according to how well they meet those priorities. This data-driven approach aims to empower project directors to make evidence-based decisions at the strategic outline case stage of any capital project, backed by robust cost analysis and a clear understanding of which priorities can be achieved or may need reconsideration.
Future-proofing NHS projects
With the extension of the tool into areas such as modern methods of construction, flexibility and adaptability, net zero metrics, as well as clinic adjacencies and efficiencies, it has the power to reduce the need for an extensive value engineering process. This is especially true at the detailed design stage when invariably cost savings often do not take into consideration the longer-term impacts on revenue spend for NHS trusts once the facility is built.
At its core, Daisy is designed to help trusts realise their initial clinical and estates priorities set out at the start of a project through a balanced, simultaneous approach which enables the successful fulfilment of the project’s benefits realisation plan.
By harnessing the power of Daisy, trusts can not only maximise the efficiency of their capital projects but also ensure that these developments are future-proofed, sustainable, and aligned with the primary goal of delivering high-quality care to patients.
