The government’s 10 Year Capital Plan marks a significant milestone for the NHS estate; the plan creates a major opportunity to modernise healthcare infrastructure and strengthen the environments in which care is delivered.
Healthcare Estates will bring the sector together to turn that ambition into safer, smarter, more sustainable and resilient facilities — across both future developments and the buildings serving patients today.
Arriving at a pivotal moment for the NHS estate, the government’s 10 Year Capital Plan for Health and Social Care sets out a long-term vision for investment in new hospitals, neighbourhood health centres, digital infrastructure, research capability and more sustainable facilities, while supporting the wider shifts from hospital to community, analogue to digital, and sickness to prevention.
It is a significant and welcome commitment to the future and the scale of the opportunity is equally clear. The latest national figures put the estimated cost of eradicating backlog maintenance at £15.9 bn. Eleven per cent of the physical estate predates the NHS, and 4,100 clinical service incidents were caused by estates and infrastructure failures in 2024/25. These figures underline the value of focused investment, shared expertise and practical solutions that can improve safety, reliability and performance across the estate.
Longer-term funding certainty can help organisations plan more strategically, develop stronger pipelines and make better-value decisions. Resources will remain finite, making disciplined prioritisation, robust evidence and effective delivery essential. Healthcare Estates brings together the policy insight, technical expertise, case studies and supplier innovation that can help organisations direct investment where it will deliver the greatest benefit.
Turning ambition into action
Across five Conference streams, sessions explore the policies, technologies, engineering solutions and operational strategies shaping the future of healthcare estates. Complementing the Conference are six Exhibition Theatres, extending the learning into practical product, engineering and service-led presentations. Together, they provide multiple routes to discover ideas, compare approaches and identify solutions relevant to each organisation’s priorities.
Together, the Conference and Exhibition show how innovation is not confined to new-build projects, it can be applied across both new and existing facilities. Healthcare settings are finding creative ways to improve resilience, embrace digital technologies, strengthen compliance, reduce carbon emissions and extend the life and value of their assets. Healthcare Estates provides the platform to share these experiences, learn from organisations already delivering change and turn proven ideas into wider progress.
Extending digital opportunity across the estate
Digital technology offers one of the clearest opportunities to improve performance across the estate. The Digital Technology and Innovation stream explores how healthcare settings can navigate differing levels of digital readiness while ensuring that technological progress benefits the entire healthcare system.
The programme moves from national strategy to practical implementation. In ‘Bridging the Gap with Digital Technology and Intelligent Hospitals’, Sarah Thomas and Eamonn Gorman from the New Hospital Programme at NHS England considering the role of digital standards and intelligent systems. Kay Mulcahy, Associate Director of National Estates Operations at NHS England, examine how the analogue-to-digital shift can advance estates maturity across the NHS.
Sessions including ‘Mind the Digital Gap: Case Studies from Embedding AI Across NHS Estates’, ‘The Digital Estates Dichotomy’ and ‘From Gap to Impact: How Collaboration and Digital Systems Improve Patient Safety’ delve into artificial intelligence, data-led decision-making and the organisational conditions needed to convert technology into measurable improvements.
Technology delivers its greatest value when it is supported by leadership, culture, data quality, interoperability, investment and realistic implementation strategies. The programme provides practical insight into how healthcare settings can combine these elements with the buildings, systems and workforce they have now, creating practical routes towards greater digital maturity.
Within the Exhibition, the Smart Hospitals & Digital Innovation Theatre extends this conversation further. Presentations such as ‘Avoiding the Two-Tier Estate: Integrating NHP Digital Standards into Legacy Wards’, ‘Digital Maturity Across the NHS Estate: Bridging Old and New’ and ‘Mind the Gap: Bridging the Divide Between New-Build and Legacy Healthcare Estates’ focus on incremental, scalable adoption.
The central message is positive: digital transformation can begin from any starting point, not just new-build projects. Healthcare Estates identifies credible, scalable pathways that organisations at every stage of maturity can benefit.
Unlocking the potential of the existing estate
For many, the most pressing question is not how to build a new hospital, but how to improve the buildings they already have. Healthcare Estates responds directly this this, with sessions focussing on achievable modernisation within operational facilities and on making the strongest use of available space, funding and assets.
The workshop ‘Levelling Up Legacy Estates: A Practical Roadmap for Bridging the Digital Two-Tier Divide’, led by Will Broadbent of The Wandsworth Group and Alexis Carlyon of Royal Cornwall Hospitals NHS Trust, provides hands-on guidance for organisations seeking achievable routes towards greater digital maturity.
Within the Estates & Facilities Services stream, topics include the use of PropTech to optimise estate performance, stronger asset information, workforce development and the implications of different ownership structures. Christopher King, Head of NHS Open Space at NHS Property Services, examines how PropTech can be harnessed to improve the NHS estate.
The Exhibition programme adds further depth with presentations on upgrading existing air-handling units, achieving HTM-compliant ventilation modernisation, improving water safety and applying smart systems to older hospitals. These are the practical questions confronting estates teams every day: how to site modern equipment in constrained spaces, maintain service continuity during work and secure the greatest safety and performance improvement from available capital. The programme is designed to help teams identify workable answers and suppliers with relevant experience.
The future of the healthcare estate will not be built entirely from scratch; much of it will evolve through careful adaptation, refurbishment and optimisation of existing assets. Peer-to-peer learning is therefore invaluable: it helps to understand what has worked, which approaches represent best practice and where the strongest value can be achieved.
The programme places significant emphasis on solutions that are practical, scalable and replicable across a wide range of healthcare environments, and most importantly are tried and tested.
Building resilience through governance and engineering assurance
Infrastructure resilience offers a direct route to safer, more reliable and more productive healthcare environments. New facilities can incorporate modern systems from the outset, while existing buildings offer significant opportunities for targeted renewal, improved monitoring and better use of asset information – even where infrastructure is approaching its intended life or spaces were not designed for today’s clinical technology, energy loads and compliance requirements.
Conference sessions examine where targeted investment, and engineering action can deliver the greatest gains. ‘2-Tier IT Versus Electrical Infrastructure Resilience Between NHS Estates and Private Sector’ considers differences in infrastructure performance and investment, while ‘Two Estates, One NHS: The MEP Infrastructure Gap We Can’t Ignore’ addresses opportunities to strengthen older sites. ‘Tackling the Maintenance Backlog: A New National Approach for a Safer, More Resilient Healthcare Estate’ will bring together Terry Stocks of AtkinsRéalis and Matthew Warchorn from the Cabinet Office’s Better Buildings programme.
Practical presentations on steam systems, boiler-house monitoring, electrical compliance, ventilation, project scoping and the use of retrofit to improve performance feature in the Engineering for Resilience Theatre. These discussions demonstrate how well-planned infrastructure decisions can enhance patient safety, service continuity, productivity and organisational resilience.
The programme also gives greater prominence to governance, assurance and medical engineering. Simon Picking, Head of Hard FM at NHS England, presents updates to HTM 02-01 on medical gas pipeline systems, while the IHEEM Medical Engineering Technical Platform examines the importance of Authorising Engineer assurance for medical engineering safety and compliance. Further contributions from IHEEM’s technical and advisory platforms will address water, ventilation, fire safety, electrical systems, decontamination and strategic estate management.
Strong governance and engineering leadership are central to ensuring that capital investment, technical expertise and good information translate into safe, reliable and compliant services over the full life of an asset. By bringing together assurance, specialist knowledge and operational experience, Healthcare Estates helps organisations strengthen capability as well as infrastructure.
As healthcare settings respond to climate events, rising demand, ageing assets and increasingly complex systems, the programme will give attendees practical routes to strengthen resilience and make it a defining measure of estate performance.
Making sustainability deliver across new and existing facilities
Sustainability remains one of the NHS’s most significant long-term priorities; offering one of the largest opportunities to improve resilience, affordability and asset renewal.
The acute estate’s energy bill reached approximately £1.2 bn in 2024/25, while less than one per cent of estate energy consumption came from on-site renewables. These figures point to considerable scope for innovation, efficiency and investment that delivers both environmental and operational benefits.
New-build hospitals can incorporate low-carbon design principles from the outset, while existing buildings offer opportunities for well-planned retrofit delivered around live clinical services. The programme addresses both routes through sessions on integrated decarbonisation, lifecycle optimisation, the Net Zero Hospital Standard, district heating, PFI estates and sustainable infrastructure planning.
Mary Aladegbola, Senior Net Zero Technical Energy Lead at NHS England, updates attendees on the Net Zero Hospital Standard, while NHS case studies examine practical approaches to electric steam, district heating and applying the Standard in operational settings.
Sustainability is a common goal that can unite organisations facing very different estate priorities. By connecting carbon reduction to energy security, compliance, whole-life cost, operational performance and the renewal of critical infrastructure, the programme identifies actions that support several organisational objectives at once.
Planning for future healthcare models
The future of healthcare delivery extends beyond individual buildings. The shift from hospital to community creates an opportunity for estate strategy, service planning, finance, digital infrastructure and workforce design to work together across organisational boundaries.
Within the Strategic Health & Social Care Planning stream, ‘Neighbourhood Health Centres: New Vision, Old Buildings – Can the Gap Be Bridged?’ assesses whether existing assets can support new models integrated care. Terry Stocks of AtkinsRéalis and Michael Wood of the NHS Confederation share evidence on the impact of healthcare in the community, while Matt Ward, Associate Director of National Estates Strategy and Planning at NHS England, provides an update on neighbourhood health centres and the ‘left shift’.
Examining the realities of delivery – ‘Designing and Delivering a Project to One of England’s Most Remote Communities’ and ‘A Project of a Lifetime: Integrated Neighbourhood Care in Practice on the Isles of Scilly’ show how estate strategy can respond to geography, access and local need. ‘Hospital 2.0 and the NHS Future Workforce’ considers how standardisation and workforce planning must develop together.
Attendees are encouraged to think beyond traditional estate boundaries in sessions covering Care Boards, community provisions, developer contributions, ownership and partnerships. The objective is not only to create better buildings, but to create better connected systems to support new pathways of care while making intelligent use of the estate already available.
Investing in skills, leadership and culture
Progress across the estate depends on people. The session ‘Mind the Gap… in Skills: Closing the NHS Estates Divide’, led by Terence Close and Victoria McKee of Belfast Health & Social Care Trust, highlights the role of workforce development in enabling long-term transformation.
‘NHS Estates Graduate Engineers: A Year of Impact, Insight and Innovation’, alongside sessions on team development, workforce planning, organisational capability and the future workforce required by Hospital 2.0, recognise that successful estate management depends on skilled professionals working across multiple disciplines and at every career stage.
As technology becomes more sophisticated and healthcare environments become more complex, investment in people is just as important as investment in buildings. Healthcare Estates takes the time to explore how leadership, technical judgement and delivery capability can help organisations realise the full value of new and existing systems.
A shared route to progress
The strength of the Healthcare Estates programme lies in its balance. It celebrates innovation while remaining grounded in operational experience. It showcases future hospitals alongside the creative renewal of existing facilities, and explores cutting-edge technologies together with practical maintenance, compliance and engineering strategies.
Most importantly, it creates opportunities for meaningful dialogue between professionals facing different challenges but pursuing the same goal: delivering safe, effective, sustainable and patient-centred healthcare environments.
‘Mind the Gap’ asks a searching question, but the answer is firmly constructive and forward-looking. Organisations begin from different positions; by sharing solutions, transferring lessons and building stronger partnerships, progress can be accelerated across the whole estate.
More ways to learn, connect and celebrate
Every healthcare estate is different, giving every organisation a distinct set of priorities. Whether the focus is a major capital project, backlog maintenance, compliance, Net Zero, digital transformation or operational efficiency, the Healthcare Estates Exhibition brings together the expertise, technologies and services needed to move forward.
More than 250 exhibiting companies and industry associations will cover design, construction, engineering, energy, digital technology, facilities management, water safety, infection prevention, HVAC and specialist healthcare environments.
The Exhibition is a marketplace to compare solutions, see technologies in action, ask detailed questions and speak directly with people who understand healthcare environments. It offers a practical opportunity to shorten research, discover new approaches and build relationships that continue beyond the event.
Celebrating standout stands
The IHEEM Branch Members Awards and Exhibitor Stand Awards — recognising the best Shell Scheme and Non-Shell Scheme stands — will form part of the event’s closing celebrations.
Where Next?
The two days will conclude with the closing plenary, ‘Where Next?’, at 16:00 on 14 October. Open to all attendees, the interactive session will bring together the event’s key themes and set out practical next steps for project continuity, sustainability, workforce resilience, innovation and higher standards across the healthcare estate.
Complimentary food and refreshments will provide a final opportunity to reflect, contribute and connect. Everyone attending the session will also receive a voucher for a free Conference pass for Healthcare Estates 2027.
Real-world insight in your hands
Following its successful debut, Engineering & Estates Essentials: Volume 2 returns as the official publication of Healthcare Estates 2026. Inspired by this year’s theme, it brings together papers, insights and perspectives from Conference speakers and professionals working at the forefront of healthcare delivery. The publication is designed to extend learning beyond the event and will be available free to attendees on Day 2, 14 October.
Space to connect
- The Lounge
Healthcare Estates is built on the value of shared knowledge, and the opportunities to continue conversations beyond formal sessions are an important part of the event. The Lounge, sponsored by Wandsworth Healthcare, offers refreshments, seating and charging points. It is included for Conference Pass holders and is also available free of charge to direct NHS employees, IHEEM members and Architects for Health members.
- The IHEEM Members’ Lounge
Meet representatives from IHEEM’s Technical Platforms, Advisory Platforms and local branches to discuss professional involvement, technical guidance, CPD, mentoring and career development.
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The Design & Construction Networking Area,
Sponsored by SDS, a space for those involved in planning, design and project delivery and will host the Architects Showcase, with representatives from Architects for Health available to discuss emerging trends and best practice.
- Cheers to Day 1
At 17:30 on 13 October, the Day 1 Networking Reception will provide complimentary drinks and refreshments, giving attendees time to reflect on the day’s discussions and build professional relationships in a relaxed setting.
A night to celebrate excellence
The Healthcare Estates Awards & Gala Dinner takes place on 13 October at the Kimpton Clocktower Hotel, Manchester. The evening will recognise the individuals, teams, projects and organisations driving excellence across healthcare engineering and estates and facilities management, with a guest appearance from Sir Kevin Sinfield. It also provides one of the sector’s most valuable opportunities to connect with colleagues, clients and senior decision-makers.
Where progress comes together
Healthcare Estates is where the healthcare estates community comes together to share knowledge, explore innovation and advance improvements. Its strength lies in the expertise and generosity of that community.
Leave with new knowledge, fresh ideas, practical solutions and valuable contacts. By sharing achievements and lessons learned, every attendee helps the sector move more quickly from ambition to delivery.
The next decade brings major investment and significant opportunity. Healthcare Estates brings national ambition, technical expertise and practical experience together, giving attendees the knowledge, contacts and confidence to move their priorities forward.