The NHS Open Space programme from NHS Property Services is now live, after a successful pilot programme. Initially, 20 locations across England will feature in the programme, with plans to rapidly expand across the country in the coming year.
NHS Open Space aims to help deliver on two of the core requirements set out in the NHS Long Term Plan – the ability to offer a greater number of services in local communities and making greater use of technology to support innovation within the health service.
The programme uses NHS buildings to maximise the range of health and wellbeing services offered to communities, using existing NHS centres instead of requiring expensive external space. The move towards more community-based care will help to reduce the pressure on large hospitals and benefit patients by having services locate closer to home.
NHS Open Space uses a web-based digital platform to enable flexible room bookings for both clinical and non-clinical space. This gives both commissioned and third party services more transparency, flexibility and efficiency, helping them to reach new patients and customers, and pay only for the time and space they need. This offers the whole NHS system (and beyond) a single system and self-service solution to book and pay for rooms online and a guarantee of a quality onsite experience with rooms ready-to-go and reception staff to provide access.
Filters on the digital platform enable the user to search for rooms by type, by postcode or by room keyword, in a similar way that many users will be familiar with for booking online holiday accommodation from sites such as AirBNB.
This go live follows a successful pilot programme in which NHS Property Services has built up a community of over 1,000 users, booking over 63,000 hours of room use across 19 locations.
The booking portal can be found here.
