Published date: 01 August 2022
Creating flexible healthcare spaces for cancer care services
Demand for NHS space is always changing, and one of the biggest recent shifts has been moving services from acute hospital settings to community-based care, and services seeking flexible access within those spaces.
The challenges cancer care services are facing
Across cancer care services, we are seeing an unprecedented growth in demand that is hard to match with supply – both for services themselves and the spaces they operate in. This is a result of the NHS seeing the highest recorded numbers of cancer referrals and first-time consultant appointments, with higher volumes of patients and increased treatment complexity due to the elective care backlog and late presentations of symptoms.
Cancer care providers are working harder than ever to keep on top of waiting time standards whilst continuing to triage, refer, diagnose, and treat cancer – ensuring patients get the best care possible.
Part of the solution to this is moving more services from larger acute hospitals to community-based locations, offering patients easier access to care, and many services are looking for flexible space in primary care centres. Flexibility is key as many services are delivered by a range of providers that do not require exclusive use of space. Therefore, the ability to book flexible space across sites offers a cost-effective solution to their property needs.
Supporting cancer care services with NHS Open Space
At NHS Open Space we are supporting the national drive to deliver services such as cancer support services, chemotherapy, palliative care, patient support groups and more, outside traditional hospital settings and closer to communities.
With NHS Open Space, organisations can easily find and book rooms across our growing portfolio of community-based properties - quickly, easily and on a pay-as-you-go basis, to help tackle growing waiting times for diagnosis to treatment.
Learn more about NHS Open Space
Through the flexible booking of NHS space we are offering customers more choice, communities a wider range of services, and making more efficient use of the NHS estate.
Growing the NHS Open Space community
Since launching our booking platform in 2019 we have built a large and diverse community of services, with over 4,000 users booking with us. We are now at 1,100 rooms across 200 sites nationwide and are expanding rapidly across the NHS Property Services portfolio – watch this space for more!
What our customers say
Hearing feedback from our customers is very important to us as we can see how NHS Open Space is making a lasting impact within the community, changing lives by providing easy access to NHS spaces.
Samantha Scott, Health Checks Project Manager at Kent Community Health NHS Foundation Trust commented: “We use NHS Open Space rooms on a daily basis, all over Kent for our outreach NHS Health Check clinics. The helpful feature on the booking system allows you to book multiple rooms on different days for the same site. When we book the rooms, we usually have several dates to book to ensure we have enough clinics for our invites that are sent, so using the platform has made the process quicker and easier to find rooms for the services for different days and book several clinics all in one go.”
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