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Lee Brown, Head of Property Appraisal at NIFES Consulting Group, explains why delivering consistently high standards with our Six Facet Surveys allows us to become a trusted partner, bringing value to our NHS clients.

Six Facets Surveys and Property Appraisals are a common, and essential, fact of life for NHS trusts around the UK. We’ve been completing these surveys on behalf of our clients for many years and they can trust us to provide accurate, effective and efficient results to benefit their organisation.

Through the survey, we’re engaged to cast our expert eyes on an estate’s:

  1. Physical condition
  2. Functional suitability
  3. Space utilisation
  4. Quality
  5. Statutory compliance
  6. Environmental management

Fundamentally, our surveys analyse every area of a trust’s building, every corner of their estate. We assess elements in all areas, from floor coverings to roof structures, and put costs against everything that’s not up to standard.

From the survey, each trust then gets a backlog maintenance figure. That’s the amount they need to invest in, and where, in order to become compliant.

Providing an expert eye at national scale

One of the trusts we’ve been working with recently is East Kent Hospitals University NHS Foundation Trust. The trust is spread out across four main sites, and a few smaller ones, totalling around 200,000m2 of estate. The NIFES team are due to complete a full Six Facet Survey on East Kent’s behalf in early 2025.

It’s very common to get contracts purely based on our reputation within the NHS. Clients move between trusts and take us with them, as they know we are a safe pair of hands. We do get work via frameworks or tenders, but a lot come to us directly based on recommendations, just as with the East Kent Hospitals project. Over the years, we’ve built up our reputation in the NHS world through hard work and nurturing our relationships with clients past and present.

There’s no ‘normal’ NHS trust, but the typical Six Facet Survey takes around eight to 12 weeks. The size of the East Kent Hospitals University NHS Foundation Trust actually makes it a larger job, totalling around16 weeks, but it’s still quite typical in terms of what we’re used to. And it’s still fast work for this scale, with four or five different disciplinary experts on site every week.

From data to decision-making

Once the survey data is collected, it’s time to present it. There’s been a cultural shift within NHS trusts towards more proactive use of data. Ten years ago, a trust would just put the report on a shelf and forget about it, but now we are seeing they are a lot more hands-on in scrutinising the data. In practice, it means trusts generally want more granular information, as detailed as possible, while still being practically useful.

How we deliver this information is up to each trust. Different stakeholders each want different insights, so we also tailor presentations for the audience. A trust’s finance team needs to know different things to its maintenance team, and so on. Customised workshops let us deliver this role-specific knowledge effectively.

And of course, the information in a Six Facet Survey needs to be actionable. This is an area where we have a genuinely unique mix of capabilities. Between the NIFES team and the wider Bellrock Group, we can offer a range of services to help clients bring their estates up to standard. Whatever a Six Facet Survey might highlight, we can support our clients and use our wider skills to offer an end-to-end solution.

From there, we help trusts stay on top of their obligations. Some smaller trusts prefer to keep surveys updated annually. Others update 20% of the survey every year, so they end up fully updated across five years. We work with trusts to develop the best approach, whatever helps them act on our input effectively.

In an industry that thrives on trust and confidence, we’re putting those values front and centre within our operations. Talk to us about futureproofing your estate’s path to compliance.

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Registered Office Address
The Brew House,
Greenails Avenue, Warrington,
Cheshire, WA4 6HL

T: 0845 168 6684