Space Survey at Kings College Hospital
King’s College Hospital (KCH) is one of London’s largest and busiest teaching hospitals, with a strong profile of local services primarily serving the boroughs of Lambeth, Southwark, Lewisham and Bromley. Their specialist services are available to patients across a wider catchment area, providing nationally and internationally recognised work in liver disease and transplantation, neurosciences, haemato-oncology and foetal medicine.
In common with a great number of NHS Trusts across the UK, King’s College Hospital NHS Trust has faced significant cost pressures for a number of years. In an endeavour to find ways of controlling costs, the Trust’s senior management team have led the way in looking for innovative ways of addressing inefficiencies within their cost base.
KCH recognised that space is a massively expensive resource and therefore wanted to determine how well it was used, and discover whether cost-saving options could be identified through better and more effective use of space.
EventMAP was selected because of our expertise and long, successful experience in the field of space utilisation, modelling and planning, and because of our unique, software-driven methodology. The Trust felt this made us the ideal partner as it explored ways to improve its efficiency of space use within the organisation.
A project was initiated to undertake space utilisation surveys within office workspace across the estate at the Trust’s Denmark Hill site. The survey aimed to gather evidenced data as to how offices, training rooms and meeting rooms were being utilised within the in-scope buildings at the organisation.
EventMAP’s survey methodology combined our proprietary survey technology with A.I. based analysis post-collection, using our bespoke suite of software tools. During the survey, teams with tablets used our cloud-based Audit survey software, which transferred site data directly into a centralised analysis environment, which allowed data to be processed, modelled and reported on. With the facility to overlay observational survey data onto previous data sources, space use trends were analysed and modelled flexibly to understand space and resource usage in comprehensive ways that simply aren’t possible with traditional survey methodologies.
The dataset then served as an evidence base that could be used to inform planning and management decisions on the use of these space types going forward. The overall objective was to ensure that all space types were being used as efficiently as possible and, if not, identify areas where improvements could be made.
A report was generated and highlighted several areas where improvements could be made and highlighted potential cost savings based on industry standards:
The survey identified low usage levels for following spaces:
a. Office Workstation Frequency 40%
b. Meeting Space Utilisation 15%
c. Training Space Utilisation 24%
Annual operational cost of supporting unused space was approximately £1.01m.
Potential capital cost saving for unused space £12.47m.
Opportunities to centralise and consolidate operations to increase efficiency where identified.
Reduction in building maintenance cost where identified through the rationalisation of space.
Meeting rooms and resources could be more efficiently managed through the implementation of EventMAP’s Booker software.
The thoroughness of EventMAP’s approach and their depth of understanding provided the Trust with a detailed picture of under-utilised space at Denmark Hill and a clear pathway forward to delivering on substantial, ongoing cost savings.
