By Sander Van de Rijdt of PlanRadar
The recent Maze Group report outlines that if the UK’s 237,000 adults’ nurses in acute, elderly and general care were to work in innovative productivity-enhancing hospitals, they would gain back a total of 25 million hours of time back every year. This equates to adding 13,500 full-time nurses to the NHS workforce. This is due to the current hospital facilities hindering optimum productivity. The report outlines that four in 10 public sector workers stated that they were unproductive for more than two hours every working week because of their workplace environment
The NHS is a recurrent issue in the UK, shown by its centrality to the Brexit campaigns and the current conservative leadership election. However, the NHS is facing severe staff shortages, and resources to fund public services are scarce. Tax rises to boost budgets are politically unattractive, but due to the UK’s increasingly ageing population, there is an urgent need to find a solution.
One new solution now being discussed is innovative productivity.
At the moment, more than 95% of data on a building site is lost or not even recorded, meaning contractors are building new facilities from scratch, over and over again. New construction technology means going forward structures will be created by a standardised set of components that incorporate significant amounts of feedback from end users into the next iteration of the design. New digital blueprints can lead the construction process by ensuring collaborative access to current plans, documents, appointments, and contacts for the whole of a project team, as well as providing sight of far more of the supply chain, manufacturing process and on-site requirements from the outset. Subsequently, this means going forward hospitals can be manufactured following the same interactive blueprints. The standardization of hospitals should enable trained health care workers to perform effectively in any new facility.
PlanRadar co-founder, Sander Van de Rijdt, believes the tech revolution finally happening in construction means ideas about how structures and buildings are built will be different in the future, designed instead around the user and optimised for how people use their spaces and environments. This revolution will change how our public services are delivered and tap into the hours of unlocked productivity in UK hospitals.
PlanRadar is designed to tackle productivity issues. Their users already realising time savings of seven working hours per week on average, which is roughly around 18% of their working time and leads to reduced costs of up to 70%. It’s one of the new construction technologies that will be pivotal in building the next wave of innovative productivity-enhancing hospitals and improving the future delivery of the NHS.