Healthcare Estates 2025 is shaping up to be a major industry event — what can attendees expect this year, and what are you most excited about?
The programme is really good this year — we’ve got some great keynotes. For me, one of the nicest things is that one of our keynotes is going to be two young people — one of whom won our Innovation in Wellbeing and Healthcare Engineering Award as part of The Big Bang Competition, and the other was the EngineeringUK’s Young Engineer of the Year. I’m very excited about seeing both of them present.
New to the closing session this year will be our IHEEM Branch Awards, to be presented to the ‘Champion of Champions’ of each branch, which is a change in format from previous years. There’ll be networking with canapes and drinks for people at the awards, giving a chance for members to share updates and how things are likely to move forward.
For me more broadly, it’s all about the networking — that’s the most exciting bit. Walking through and not quite realising just how many people you know on all the stands. It’s probably the best networking opportunity within the whole industry.
We’re also offering free coffee in mornings and afternoons for everybody this year, that’s new for exhibitors.
So those are the best things in my opinion, but it’s just a really good event in general.
How is IHEEM working to support ESG (environment, social and governance) initiatives and sustainability in healthcare estates, and do you see members’ priorities changing in this space?
As an Institute, we’ve tried to lead the way, and by example, in sustainability. As part of our recent Head Office redevelopment, we aimed to be as sustainable as possible to show what you can actually achieve on a refurbishment. Heating and hot water now come from an air source heat pump, there’s a new ventilation extraction system, solar panels, and dimmer LED lights which go on and off automatically to improve energy efficiency.
We think approaches like this can help support the NHS to get to Net Zero. Many of our members and companies are doing a lot of good work in this area, and Steven Heape, who runs our sustainability platform, will be at Healthcare Estates this year, talking about all of this and more.
All of our Trusts are aiming towards Net Zero, I just don’t know how easy it’s going to be to get there. My personal opinion is that it’s going to be incredibly difficult.
What’s the biggest barrier for companies to achieve Net Zero?
Energy — the sheer amount of energy needed, and finding a sustainable source for it. Ground source heat is becoming an area of greater exploration for some of members, for example.
It’s also cost — that’s a massive barrier. The maintenance backlog is so big already, and priorities are in different areas. There’s just no funding to do all the work.
The Carbon Energy Fund do a fantastic job of supporting projects to enable them to actually deliver significant improvements in energy efficiency across Trust estates. It’s difficult, but people are doing their best, doing what they can — and maybe they’ll get there.
Membership is at the heart of IHEEM — how are you increasing membership, and what do you see as the biggest benefits for members?
We’ve been very lucky that our membership has been growing organically at five per cent a year, so in the last four years we’ve grown by a massive 20%. I think that’s a reflection on the work we have put in at Head Office to revolutionise the Institute, and our continual drive to improve member offer and experience.
Our team are highly engaged with membership interaction and a personal level of engagement and support, something we feel very proud of and which we believe is a unique aspect of our offer as an Institute. We refer to our membership and network as ‘our IHEEM family’.
Pete Sellars (IHEEM’s CEO) is always conscious of membership benefits, and questions how everything we do will help our members. Our members fully get involved; we have over 100 volunteers — committee members that we just couldn’t exist without.
In the last year we have launched our Mentoring Scheme to support members looking for industry guidance and development opportunities around career progression, or achieving professional registration or Authorising Engineer accreditation.
In terms of professional registration too, we offer our members as much support as needed to guide them through this process and help them achieve their goal. You don’t get that with any other institutes — we may be smaller, but we offer a more personalised service.
Digitally, we have made website UI improvements with some significant and exciting rolling out in the coming months, as well as updates to our MyIHEEM CPD and Mentoring recording systems.
I think our wider offer is very strong, too. Our conferences, networking, and events programme, platform expertise and guidance notes — we have a pretty impressive offering across an extensive range of engineering disciplines, all within the healthcare sector.
There has been a recent focus at the Institute on growing and supporting our Apprentice and Students members, as well as looking closely at how we can engage and inspire the next-generation of healthcare engineers through developing our STEM strategy.
More recently, looking at the EBME (Electro-Biomedical Engineering) side of the business, we’ve just established a Medical Engineering Technical Platform, which will look at the medical devices from an engineering perspective. I see EBME as a massive growth area. If it grows to as big as I think it will be, that could have a massive impact on our membership numbers.
How is IHEEM engaging with younger professionals, students and children to ensure the next generation is represented?
We’re really trying to get young people interested in healthcare and engineering early on, and getting more and more involved with the STEM agenda. We’ve delivered multiple schools workshops across a range of ages, from hospital-themed Lego challenges for younger ages, to working more closely with the UK’s newly established Maths School network presenting careers talks to their sixth-form students.
In this last year we sponsored a new award at The Big Bang Competition, and had a major presence at The Big Bang Fair at the Birmingham NEC, with the IHEEM stand being supported by 27 volunteers from eight companies across our sector.
Our collaborators brought along an impressive range of technology and ‘gadgets’ from their relevant organisations, meaning the students had access to VR for spatial planning and designing for neurodiversity, virtual reality welding, a platform game focused around electricity supply in a healthcare setting, 3D printing, coding, and robotics.
We even had one of the VR headsets, showcasing the recent IHEEM HQ redevelopment, set up by our architects so the experience invited students to virtually explore our building — and find and pet one of our team’s dog in the office.
We had loads of different activities for them, but everything was all centred around healthcare. It was a huge event — 21,000 young people.
A few years ago, we sponsored the Faraday Challenge, at the Institution of Engineering and Technology (IET), which saw a team of six students win a nationwide competition to design a prototype to be used in a children’s hospital. When we were more recently up at The Big Bang Fair, one of the teachers from the winning Faraday Challenge team approached Pete, and told him that two young people from that team of six are now studying biomedical engineering at university. That’s the sort of thing you don’t usually find out, you don’t normally get that kind of feedback, but I think that’s a real impact. We got two young people into this sector through our sponsorship.
In terms of apprentices, we were recently at the NHS England graduate apprentice scheme up in Leeds. They brought some graduates in at leadership level, and we’re supporting them by giving the students free membership, as well as free entry to our conferences. Our apprentices and students can also frequently get free entry to conferences and events thanks to the generosity of our corporate sponsors, who often sponsor a year of free entry for these membership groups.
We’ve also got the North East apprenticeship programme, which a few years ago, after 40 years in operation, finally received funding from the government. You’ll probably find most people from estates in the North East have gone through that scheme, I think probably every director has gone through it. It’s really well received.
The estates and FM sector has traditionally been male-dominated. What steps is IHEEM taking to improve diversity and inclusion, particularly for women?
The IHEEM EDI Committee are tasked with looking at the full range of opportunities and challenges of diversity and inclusion across the sector — not just for women, but across all underrepresented and minority groups. We were immensely proud to have our first female president a couple of years ago, and for me I think that was a massive step forward.
We know the industry and our membership is male dominated, but we have female representation across our directorship and on the IHEEM Council. As a professional institute, we can, and do, promote equality in all disciplines. Interestingly, we are seeing more women entering the medical device side of the business – it’s encouraging to see.
What do you see as the most pressing challenges facing the healthcare estates sector right now?
Net Zero targets, funding constraints, ageing infrastructure, and the maintenance backlog are all affecting our industry.
Infection prevention is a big one, and the IHEEM Decontamination Technical Platform is actually our biggest — we’ve got over 30 members who are very focused on this, which affects lots of areas throughout the healthcare estate. There’s a whole range of issues that surround this, and lessons that need to be learned.
This is one of the reasons why the Healthcare Estates 2025 strapline is ‘Prevention is better than cure’. A number of those presenting at the conference are going to be discussing some of the major incidents that have happened across the UK in this area, and hopefully we’ll really start to see the learning from it.
How is IHEEM helping members navigate new and evolving regulations such as the Building Safety Act?
A lot of our members are on the BSI standards committees. Our technical platforms feedback on any changes and will also work to do some practitioner guidance, too.
I know the fire and emergency lighting regulations that come out next year have had a couple of our company affiliates involved, and we’ll be running webinars on the main issues and solutions here. The next annual IHEEM Innovation Conference will also be addressing these issues, too. As things continue to change, we will be putting out and updating our guidance accordingly.
You’ve built a career that has taken you to COO of IHEEM. What first drew you into this sector, and what keeps you motivated?
My background is in finance — I’m an accountant by trade. I came via local authority, then went into housing regeneration, then contract catering, then telecommunications, and then I worked for a company that was going through a managed wind up on car finance.
My heart is in the voluntary sector — when I worked in the housing regeneration sector I used to go out and train community groups on how to get funding from Europe, lottery money etc. I always found the voluntary sector makes more with every penny they’ve got, more than any other sector out there.
Then this job came up. I actually got offered two jobs in the same day — the other was working for an alternative investment fund, which I talked it through with my husband who assured me I’d get bored there.
IHEEM was only meant to be temporary, just to hold the reigns for a bit and to keep operations running smoothly during a period of transition. I started in December, with Pete starting at the end of January, and by the end of February we were ripping out the old systems, and moving to a cloud-based remote IT system, and installing new CRM systems.
I’ve now been here for seven years. I almost can’t believe it. That wasn’t really my intention, but every day is different, no two days are the same, and I wouldn’t change it for the world. One day I could be involved in an apprenticeship scheme, the next day doing accounts, and the next running a conference somewhere, or a branch session elsewhere. In a way, the pandemic was a good opportunity for us to focus on the back office stuff we wanted to do whilst we couldn’t have live events. But it’s definitely good to get back to live events, see people and network again.
It’s a lovely organisation to work with, and you can really see the benefits of what you’ve been doing and working on, see the system changes in action. I’ve got such a good team around me, and we’ve doubled in size since I started. I couldn’t do this job without every single person, everyone does their bit. I’m incredibly proud of all of them. The team is the most important aspect of my job. If you’ve got a team behind you that support you, and you support them, it just works, everyone moves together in the same direction, and that’s all you can ask for really.
Looking ahead, where would you like to see IHEEM — and the healthcare estates industry — five years from now?
I’d like to see IHEEM continue expanding by doing what it’s already doing. I think there’s going to be a lot coming up in the next five years at the Institute, and in healthcare generally. Net Zero, backlogs — I’m not sure how that’s going to happen but I’m hopeful. I think the Healthcare Estates show is as big as it could be, but I hope that it continues to provide the quality of what it is now. I think that’s all we can really hope for. I’m sure the Institute will keep growing, and get bigger and better. I hope we continue to provide more support to members, more services. But personally in five years’ time, I’d like to be retired!