Building Healthy Futures: Strengthening our Healthcare Estates

The NHS has been an integral part of UK society for over 75 years, ensuring the health and wellbeing of our communities so that we can thrive. It is one of the largest employers in the UK and provides over 1.5 million patient interactions every day; truly, it is woven into the fabric of our society.

However, it is well recognised that the NHS is facing many challenges, including a lack of capital funding to address its aging and increasingly unfit estates. The impacts that this is having and will have on the health of our communities and our shared vision for the NHS are far reaching and must be addressed.

Building healthy futures: Strengthening our healthcare estates is the
BPF’s primary and secondary care policy document, setting out the importance of estates to our healthcare system, and how we can use estates to deliver the NHS’ vision. In it, we call on the Government to work with industry to explore how private capital can be deployed to alleviate public funding pressures and deliver on NHS ambitions.

We note that, in referring to primary and secondary care throughout this document, it includes within this the mental health services provided by the 54 mental health trusts in England, which are integral to healthcare provision and are often overlooked in NHS reform.