A small, but perfectly formed, team of Estates staff are transforming the service provided to CNTW at the Carlton clinic in Cumbria. CNTW recently took on Estates management in Cumbria and this is being overseen by NTW solutions. Tracey Sopp, our Managing Director, saw on a visit how the team there has worked quickly to get things set up, to respond to maintenance on the site and is already making a real positive difference.
The team have worked hard to get things set up and when they started, they had no equipment stores, no vans, and no base. They have turned that situation around quickly and the team is now up and running. The previous maintenance work had been carried out on a paper system and now the team have moved this to our existing estates software system which is partly responsible for reducing wait times for work.
Some of the team at the Carleton Clinic have come from outside the NHS and told Tracey how they were motivated by the patients and supporting better care. How it makes the job even more rewarding as they can see the difference it makes to the service users and staff.
A typical day revolves around responding to priority jobs and then carrying out preventative planned maintenance. This preventative work is crucial as it stops problems occurring in the first place. When the team was first being recruited, they were short on staff but this meant tackling a variety of work, with everything from changing a toilet seat to checking floor surfaces were in a good condition.
The response from clinical teams has been fantastic and they have already seen an improvement in the condition of the site. The staff told Tracey how this has some drawbacks in that more maintenance requests were coming in as staff see an improvement in the responsiveness! But it is a positive step forward and hopefully the start of a virtuous cycle of improvement of the estate.
This has all been possible thanks to the team in Sunderland who have picked up some of the slack while people have been released to set up the service in Cumbria. The whole Estates team have pulled together and can be truly proud of the difference that they are making.
