University Hospitals Birmingham NHS Foundation Trust (UHB) has unique expertise in the process of commissioning and decommissioning the provision of healthcare following its completion of the Queen Elizabeth Hospital Birmingham (QEHB), an ambitious and large-scale development project to build a new, state-of-the-art facility.

QEHB has been internationally acknowledged as a highly successful project and enables us to offer other healthcare providers a systematic and proven approach to major development projects.

Prior to developing the new QEHB, clinical services were provided by two old hospitals. With changes in care and treatment these were no longer fit for purpose, services were poorly configured with duplication and significant maintenance costs. To realise our ambitions of constantly improving care, meeting rising patient expectation, continuing to attract high performing staff and achieving financial stability we saw this major development as an opportunity to plan for the future.

UHB successfully transferred its services and 8,000 staff from the two hospitals, a mile-and-a-half apart, into the UK’s newest and largest single site hospital in 2010, on time and on budget.

The transfer involved moving over 800 patients in 52 hours, including 65 Critical Care patients. All this was achieved whilst maintaining delivery of 24 hour, 7 days a week services.

UHB is currently working with a number of hospitals across the world on a number of similar initiatives including similar projects in Perth, Australia and Belfast, Northern Ireland.

UHB Model of Care

The core principles of UHB’s advice and support are the UHB Model of Care, which emphasises that:

• the new hospital delivers the ‘best in care’
• elective (planned) and emergency (unplanned) care pathways should be separated
• models of care are discrete episodes of care
• patients should be in the appropriate model for their care, for example, ambulatory, elective inpatient
• workforce plans should reflect new models of care including the introduction of new roles where appropriate
• new models should be tested prior to the move
• all processes to be paper-appropriate and support the clinical pathway
• clinical IT and informatics should underpin all activities and support efficient progress through patient pathways, information sharing and decreased duplication of work

The UHB Model of Care approach assists in providing leading edge healthcare for patients, and our methodologies address financial considerations, technological developments, growth and market demands. We provide the expertise and tools required to commission new services successfully. These include:

• Technical and operational design
• IT and informatics strategy including healthcare demand and capacity modelling
• Contract design and management
• Technical and operational commissioning
• Programme management processes and documentation
• Governance
• Equipment procurement and installation