Major tri-hospital FM deal gears up for March

16 January 2013

A £700 million, three-hospital total FM contract is kicking off on 1 March when 2,000 staff transfer to Interserve.

The seven year deal, as reported by FM World in September last year and finalised this month, sees Interserve taking over FM at Leicestershire Partnership NHS Trust, University Hospitals of Leicester NHS Trust and the Leicester City, Leicestershire County and Rutland Primary Care Trust Cluster.

Staff transferring are a mixture of in-house and people working for private suppliers, Andrew Chatten, head of estates and facilities at University Hospitals of Leicester, told FM World.

Services include catering, cleaning, maintenance and security across more than 550 NHS buildings and properties, totalling 490,000 sq m (nearly 5.3 million sq ft).

"It's an ambitious project and took two years to set up," said Chatten, "It's also possibly the first of its kind in the healthcare sector. It covers all FM at the hospitals, with the exception of some specialist work such as lift management and maintenance of gas and other utilities."

The deal is essentially a framework contract worth up to £700 million over the seven years, said Chatten. Around £400 million of that is for total FM for the three hospitals under the framework's Lot One section.

Lot Two is for 'estates transformation' and is worth around £300 million. The work will be for asset upgrading and new construction and, importantly, is open to other trusts that wish to use it. Interserve doesn't have exclusivity on it and other suppliers can be brought in.

Work under Lot Two includes FM consultancy, business case development, procurement and construction. A team of surveyors will soon be looking at how the properties are running, from boilers and heaters to lighting and general energy consumption.

"A major hurdle for contracts of this size is ensuring communication between the provider and all the stakeholders," said Maria Kitching, director of mobilisation and transformation for Leicestershire.

With this tri-hospital contract, communication is particularly important because the client stakeholders range from community care to large hospitals, said Kitching, who has been with Interserve for 15 years and before that was a private sector and NHS nurse for 25 years.

Her work for Interserve has included private finance initiative proposals and large mobilisations, including at University College London Hospitals in 2003.

Understanding the estate through the established NHS Six Facet Survey helps in deciding if it is fit for purpose and what will need to be changed in the future, she said.