Our promise to customers: launching our new Customer Charter

We have launched our first customer charter – setting out our promise and commitment to our NHS partners.

As part of the NHS, NHS Property Services’ purpose is to help transform the NHS estate, delivering on the Long Term Plan and enabling our NHS colleagues to deliver excellent patient care. With this charter we are bringing these ambitions to life, setting out clear, practical and tangible promises so that you know what to expect from our properties and the services we provide.

We acknowledge that we haven’t always been responsive enough and we need to make things clearer for our customers.  A charter and the promises made inside it are only ever as good as the actions taken to deliver it. A key part of our strategy is to be more open, transparent and accountable and so we will report against our performance of the charter every year.

This is my 18th year working in the NHS and the one consistent theme has always been change.  We need to be better at understanding how this affects our customers and the patients they serve.  The charter outlines how we plan to work with our NHS colleagues to deliver the Long Term Plan. For example, we will support the NHS as it evolves by working with Integrated Care Systems (ICSs) to develop and implement estate strategies that enable their ambitions for regional healthcare transformation. We will improve NHS environments by prioritising construction and refurbishment projects that improve the physical and mental wellbeing of NHS colleagues, patients and local communities.

We also outline how we want to work with you on a day to day basis, such as answering queries promptly and making our billing clearer and easy to understand. Ultimately, we are committed to becoming an easier partner for our customers to work with. To ensure we are offering you the most effective support we can, we also make some asks of our customers such as keeping us up to date on occupancy arrangements. Building productive partnerships will be crucial to delivering on these promises, and our charter outlines how we would best like to work with – and what we need from - our customers to build these relationships.

The charter has been developed in partnership with our customers, the Department of Health and Social Care and NHS England/Improvement, but it is by no means a fixed document and we hope to continually evolve it to ensure we are responding to customer feedback. We know we have work to do to make this business better for you. 

If you have any feedback on what you might like to see in future editions, we’d love to hear from you.