NHS Open Space, a service launched by NHS Property Services (NHSPS), has welcomed 40 new sites to the booking platform, bringing the total number of sites to 190, with 1,100+ rooms all available to book on a flexible, ‘pay-as-you-go’ basis.
NHSPS says the expansion will bring more choice to health and wellbeing providers, offering clinical and non-clinical spaces for hire on an hourly or daily basis, with greater flexibility at an affordable price. “I am delighted to be able to announce yet another expansion of NHS Open Space this year,” said Christopher King, Principal Strategic asset manager at NHSPS. “We have seen more than 976,000 hours of care provided to patients across England with this scheme, showing just how vital a range of services are to local communities. From counselling and physiotherapy to vaccine administration, we hope to enable excellent patient care and deliver on the NHS Long Term Plan through our spaces.”
NHSPS is working with partner, Kajima Partnerships, to deliver this booking platform. It says that with this expansion it hopes to further grow its community of over 2,900 unique users, using its flexible booking system to make better use of NHS spaces and offer communities a wider range of services from their local NHS hubs.
Samantha Scott, Health Checks project manager at Kent Community Health NHS Foundation Trust, said: “We use NHS Open Space rooms on a daily basis, all over Kent for our outreach NHS Health Check clinics. The helpful feature on the booking system allows you to book multiple rooms on different days for the same site. When we book the rooms, we usually have several dates to book to ensure that we have enough clinics for our invites that are sent, so using the platform has made the process quicker and easier to find rooms for the services for different days and book several clinics all in one go.”