Which choices will you make?

In a world where we are expected to reduce expenditure and at the same time improve standards with existing infrastructure and resources, accurate information is vital.

We provide a range of services and tools to provide accurate data to support our partners and help you to make evidence based decisions about your existing and future estate requirements.

What do you know about your estate?

We can help you to collate and analyse the information so that you can identify where you need to focus your resources.

Knowledge and Needs Assessment

• What are the local needs in my area?
• Where are local services located?
• What is the condition of these assets?
• How well used are these facilities?
• Are we meeting our carbon reduction commitments?

All of the base line information collected from these activities is accessible via our estate management tool, HOST.

HOST is a user-friendly secure web access based service to provide our partners with  strategic, integrated, up-to-date, accurate data about your current estate and resource capacity.

All our information can be used to produce strategic reports, scenario test new ideas and forecast future infrastructure requirements.

This means that our partners can maximise the benefits of capacity planning quickly and easily, without expending too much resource in doing so.

Discover more about our service choices to support your knowledge and needs assessment requirements, download our brochure.

Understanding your current estate through a condition, utilisation and needs assessment is the first stage to enable you to make informed choices. The outcome of this assessment is accurate baseline service and estate data to inform your strategic planning and implementation plans.

Managing the challenge

It is hard to escape the current debate over the future delivery of healthcare in the UK, and with the publication of the Health and Social Care Bill the Government has taken another big step in what is the biggest restructuring of the NHS in its history.

New commissioners such as GP consortia will need to ensure they have the skills and resources to commence these functions effectively and seek assistance where required to prepare themselves to become successful commissioning organisations.

The success and effectiveness of these reforms and GP’s proposed new commissioning role will be determined by the development and commissioning of improved pathways of care (both in quality and efficiency) by the new commissioners. These changes in service provision will be supported in no small part by the condition, suitability, flexibility and control of the buildings from which health professionals provide those services.

At a time when the NHS is expected to make £20 billion efficiency savings over the next 4 year’s, money for capital investment is at a premium.

Consequently, the pressure will be on the NHS and it’s commissioners to reduce expenditure and at the same time improve standards within its existing infrastructure resources.

And if this cannot be done, new infrastructure and service delivery will either be remodelled from existing stock or created from capital receipts that flow from an estate rationalisation and disposal programme.

In each and every case capital will be in short supply and will normally have to be generated by the local health economy.

Over the next couple of years, the transitional phase to implement these bold reforms is a critical time for local PCT’s to ensure the existing estate, wherever it is, is ‘fit for purpose’ and ‘transition ready’ before responsibility transfers to the new commissioners.

GP’s need to ensure that they have all the information they need about the existing and planned estate to deliver a robust ‘business’.

What are the information challenges?

Fundamentally the challenge is to improve health service delivery closer to home and in doing so explore new ways of working and different care pathway management in a very difficult economic climate; effectively ‘do more for less’.

Our approach is less about providing answers to what solutions we think you might need or imposing fixed methods, but more about providing the right choices to be debated and progressed to a bespoke response that meets your individual service aspirations..

We offer an independent view.

We believe the scale of the challenge requires a logical informed approach. Our approach can be summarised into the following areas:

1. Assessing the Challenge and Scoping the opportunity

• Health and Social Care ‘Enterprise’ Mentoring
  • Funding and financial assessments
  • Legal structures, Governance (contracts and leases)
  • Identification and transition of identified work streams
  • Understanding the opportunity – Getting the most out of the commissioning reforms
  • Understanding the estate – establishing what exists already
  • Developing the service and commissioning objectives
  • Community driven strategies and new models of care

2. Managing the Transition – Actions for here and now

• Developing an infrastructure and investment plan
• Managing space more effectively
• Supporting service change as requested and knowing what can and can’t be done
• Separating property management from service provision

3. Monitoring the Business – Long-term support services

• Financial and business management support
• Business planning
• Corporate Governance
• Procurement and Service Level Agreement Monitoring
• Ensuring continuous service improvement

The outputs from each of the four stages of our expert estate management process help our partners understand their estate to enable them to make informed choices.

Choices for Assistive Technology Solutions for Care Pathways

The patient and their care network agree what is clinically appropriate to meet the needs of the patient and the most efficient use of time and resources to develop the social and clinical care pathway.

The utilisation of the assistive technology is critical in providing the patient with independent living in their own home whilst receiving the appropriate level of clinical or social care that does not reduce the quality of life.

This type of solution can benefit the following patient groups:

• Vulnerable people who need the support of social or health care services e.g. people with physical disabilities; frail or elderly people; people suffering from dementia or epilepsy
• People with long term conditions e.g. COPD; people undergoing cancer treatment; diabetes; heart failure
• Intermediate care patients who no longer require an inpatient stay

The assistive technology solution is a flexible system that uses non-invasive wireless sensors in the home to monitor and manage a patient’s daily activities.

For example:

• is the individual moving about the home normally;
• has the refrigerator door/medicine cupboard been opened;
• are the entrance and exit door doors being opened and closed,

The system can also link to remote temperature, pulse and blood pressure monitoring dependent on the patients’ medical monitoring requirements appropriate to their clinical condition.

The information is sent via a secure web server to an agreed Care Network, allowing online daily activity reports as well as alert notifications via text message or email.

The Care Network is established dependant on the patient’s requirements but as an example may include designated family members, a carer, GP or a community nurse.

Discover more about the benefits of at home care pathway management and our ‘Freedom’, ‘Health in your Hands’ and ‘Continuing Care at Home’ packages to support new models of care delivery.

Implementing assistive technology solutions to help manage care pathways supports service re-design and new models of care delivery. Benefits include:

• More patient choice; enabling patients to live in their own home and community
• Reduction in expensive hospital admissions
• Supports service re-design

Choices for supporting academic operations

University Technical Colleges, Academies and Free Schools

Equity Solutions has an established supply chain in place to provide a range of services to existing Academies or chains of Academies, as well as aspiring University Technical Colleges and Academies.

Generally, the services comprise those necessary to deliver the “back-office” functions required to be delivered by the schools:

• financial management/accounting/tax;
• human resources management including payroll;
• legal advice/company secretarial work; and
• premises management.

We can provide any or all of these services on an individual school or federation basis.

For schools aspiring to be Academies or University Technical Colleges we also provide support on the business case and legal conversion processes.

Our services Choices include support for;

• Assessing the Challenge / Scoping the Opportunity
  Site finding, estate audit / condition review, site master planning and options appraisal, business planning, financial advisory and enterprise ‘mentoring’ support.
• Managing the Transition
  Managing the implementation plan, capital works (refurbishment, re-model, new build), investment and financial management and interim estate management (property and facilities management).

• Monitoring the Transition and Beyond
  Financial and business management support, estate management service agreements

For colleges aspiring to be a University Technical College we can help develop a robust business case utilising the service choices above which match your needs, to support an application to The Baker Dearing Trust.

Our expert team also provides legal, financial and other advisory services to proposers of Free Schools or acts as developer in order to relieve the proposers of much of the non-education related burden of activities.

In particular, we specialise in site finding and options analyses.

• Back-office support. We are expert in circumnavigating departmental processes and bureaucracies. Choosing any or all of the services we offer, you would be relieved of inevitable non-education activities.
• Business case and legal support for schools aspiring to be Academies or University Technical Colleges. We have excellent relationships with both policy-makers and managers in Partnerships for Schools, The Baker Dearing Trust and the Department of Education.
• Site finding and options analysis for proposers of free schools. Through our service Choices you will be provided with legal, financial and other necessary advice to help you through any transition or legal conversion processes.

In addition to the advisory and support services Equity Solutions can provide, we have many years of experience across the Group in providing integrated design services for pre-school, primary and secondary schools.

We are experienced in working as part of private sector consortia on PPP, PFI, Building Schools for The Future and Academies frameworks as well as direct appointments with schools and diocese.

Many of these direct appointments include estate options analysis and support to the schools or diocese to secure funding to undertake improvements to the school to meet current educational standards.

View our portfolio to see the inspired spaces for learning we have been involved with.

Engaging children with ‘Our Space’

We have developed an interactive game called ‘Our Space’, in order to give children at the schools we are working with a chance to get involved and have some input into the design process.

The game involves looking at the different areas within the school – Learning, External, Dining, and Toilets & Cloakrooms – and enabling the children to think about how they would like these spaces to look and feel.

As part of the game children are asked to give their opinions and preferences on things such as open plan v enclosed classrooms, quiet areas, styles of seating, materials, breakout areas, colour etc.

The information gathered from ‘Our Space’ feeds into the planning process for a school and helps to give us an understanding of how pupils use the different spaces in their school and how the current facilities can be improved.

• Integrated design service, which includes an in-depth and expert analysis of the options how to improve your estate to meet the current educational standards.
• Support in securing funding. You will be provided with an expert analysis report, which will include recommendations for improvement of the school environment and most cost-efficient and environmentally friendly design options.
• Creating an inspired space for learning. The children in the school will be involved in an interactive game called “Our Space” and the information gathered will be included in the planning process for creating truly inspired design solution.

There is now a near unanimous consensus that climate change is real, is happening now and is caused predominantly by human activity.

Our sustainability solutions help to combat this change by supplying low carbon energy to industrial and commercial users from onsite generation of renewable power and heat to the supply of green tariff electricity via the grid.

Through our sustainable energy provider subsidiary Green2Go we work with clients to help them reduce their costs and carbon output through energy efficiency initiatives leading to reduced energy demand.

Our services are tailor made to meet customers’ individual cost, energy security, carbon output and emissions reporting requirements.

By providing a mix of on-site and off-site green energy we can guarantee the security of uninterrupted power supply.

By providing a mix of on-site and off-site green energy we can guarantee the security of uninterrupted power supply.

Mix and match Choices to ‘Go Green’

Discover more about our green energy choices to support your carbon reduction challenges, download our brochure.

On-site energy Choices

Through our sustainable energy provider subsidiary Green2Go we can advise on the benefits and suitability of a wide range of renewable energy technologies based on individual customer resources and requirements. These include:

• Biofuelled combined heat and power (CHP) generation
• Biofuel for heating boilers
• Biodiesel for road transport
• Wind power
• Solar PV
• Solar thermal
• Air source heat pumps
• Ground source heat pumps

We can also assist with:

• Evaluating the potential for different renewable technologies within customers’ estates
• Developing a robust business case for the installation of appropriate technologies
• Submitting applications for planning approval and relevant renewable incentives
• Installing and maintaining the selected technology
• Measuring and reporting the resulting reduction in carbon emissions.

Green Choices for energy supply

In addition to onsite renewable energy Green2Go is also able to supply green tariff electricity via the national grid mains to further enable our customers to contribute to combating the effects of climate change.

This offers a wide range of valuable benefits including:

• Simple and transparent pricing with one competitive all inclusive price per kilowatt hour. Unlike conventional electricity suppliers Green2Go does not seek to confuse the rate you pay by quoting an artificially low unit cost but then adding a wide range of distribution costs on top. With Green2Go the price you see is the price you pay
• The electricity supplied is 100% green from a range of renewable sources including surplus power exported to the grid from Green2Go’s own CHP generating systems and power from anaerobic digestion of food waste collected as part of Green2Go’s waste to energy initiatives
• The electricity supplied is 100% green from a range of renewable sources including surplus power exported to the grid from Green2Go’s own CHP generating systems and power from anaerobic digestion of food waste collected as part of Green2Go’s waste to energy initiatives
• All electricity is half hourly metered. This automatically captures the amount of electricity consumed during each half hour period of the day, which means that all charges are based on actual rather than estimated consumption. This ensures that you only pay for what you use. In addition it allows particular times of the day when consumption is unexpectedly high to be identified and corrective action taken to improve energy efficiency and so reduce costs. Properties that are non half hourly metered can simply have the meter upgraded to benefit from Green2Go’s supply
• By signing up with Green2Go customers can make a valuable contribution to future renewable energy projects as all profits are reinvested in the development of additional renewable energy capacity
• Further endorsement of customers’ environmental and CSR credentials.

• Full carbon management plan. The plan that you will be provided can include advice on legislation, carbon reduction plans, carbon measurement and certification and carbon trading.
• Energy and environmental assessment and strategy. We have formed long term relationships with key supply chain partners who are experts in bio fuels, electrical generators, Combined Heat and Power systems, wind, solar, geothermal and biomass systems.
  Thus we are at the forefront of these fast-changing technologies and can assess your power and infrastructure needs. We will provide a bespoke, sustainable energy and associated infrastructure or design solution.

• Reduced impact on climate change. Through environmentally sustainable strategies we help our clients reduce their costs and carbon output through energy efficiency initiatives leading to reduced energy demand.