Introduction

1

The Kent and Medway NHS and Social Care Partnership Trust (KMPT) provides care across Kent and Medway for people with mental health problems and learning disabilities. The trust also provides some specialist services across south east England and cares for people of all ages, from mothers with infants through to older people living with conditions such as dementia. KMPT aims to improve people’s lives by providing high quality care and the best possible experience of our services; delivering services in a wide range of places including hospitals, community clinics, people’s homes and some GP practices.

2

The trust requires a range of specialist facilities to support excellent mental healthcare through a high quality patient care environment. Providing a high quality working environment for 3,318 (at time of writing) members of staff is also a prerequisite for delivering consistently high quality care. Resources are finite so estate must be efficiently utilised to deliver a consistent and excellent environment, in a way that is affordable.

3

The trust’s aim is to achieve a consistently-high standard of accommodation for patients and staff while managing its resources effectively. This means using the estate well and looking for opportunities to optimise it, using benchmark measures for the utilisation of the estate set by the Carter Review, and information available from the Model Hospital resource to ensure best value for money from these facilities.

4

The strategy is about far more than the buildings used to look after inpatients, provide outpatient clinics and deliver administration and support services. While this document is about buildings in the traditional sense of hospitals, clinics, and offices for example, it must also be about building the capacity, flexibility, partnerships and resilience to face the challenges ahead for our services.

5

The development of the estate strategy has been through a process of engagement, working with the trust’s care group clinicians and managers, its workforce, service user and carer groups and wider stakeholders.

6. Across the organisation, the following overarching aims for the estate have been identified:

• Provide safe, secure, effective and therapeutic environments
• Use the right kinds of buildings in the right location
• Reduce overall costs
• Constantly improve the appropriateness and quality of environments for patients and staff
• Develop more environmentally - sustainable buildings and services
• Generate income from surplus accommodation where possible
• Provide staff with safe and healthy workplaces
• Ensure links between our use of buildings and emerging technologies.