All Present & Correct

Ireland’s health service boasts nationwide property register

The restructuring of the health service in the Republic of Ireland gave the opportunity to establish a nationwide property register.

The Health Service Executive’s project manager, Gerry Hanley, told Hospital Bulletin how the process had been achieved. ‘Moving from a regional structure to a unitary system, we needed to work on a corporate level and an operational level,’ explained Gerry. ‘With an opportunity to get all our property information onto one system we looked at all the options. ‘We knew there could be problems bringing our business up to speed and that we’d need to work with someone that could manage whatever we threw at them. Some of our regional boards had worked with 3i Studio and we knew they had a huge in-house resource – specialists in many areas such as energy and the environment – all available to us, as opposed to other companies who just offered computer software.

The person-to-person process they outlined was just as meticulous. 3i Studio demonstrated a good understanding of the corporate and operational requirements and we set out a road map with them. They had an understanding of the brief and kept us focussed on that. Things moved forward very quickly. – it gave us a framework to build on. As a result we have one of the first HSE-wide integrated systems.’ The details of HSE’s properties have now all been populated onto 3i Studio’s EstateManager that feeds and drives EstateTerrier. EstateManager gave the Health Service Executive all the key management information at your fingertips, providing a central reference point for all the essential estate data required to keep abreast of a property portfolio and internal organisational changes. The Health Service Executive also used the EstateTerrier module as their legal document retrieval system. It has the ability to store all the key management information regarding the legal aspects of property management: property acquisition and disposal, leases and licenses, rights of way and deeds of covenant. A recent innovation is the introduction of a key dates reminder screen. 3i Studio Software’s resources included manpower and womanpower.

Technical director Jeremy Matheson oversaw the project delivery while database analyst Menika Narang has been on site for over a year. ‘Menika is the contact point for the estates and property managers,’ explained Gerry. ‘She’s very much part of the structure that enables it to happen – filtering, summarising and analysing the information required at corporate management level. Her role is to take all the data of each property and investigate the titles, verifying the information and populating the new system. Menika is the interface between HSE and management and staff.’

Describing the history of 3i Studio’s involvement in Ireland, technical director Jeremy Matheson said: ‘We first got involved with Eastern Health Shared Services – the agency that dealt with property around Dublin. They took on a combination of EstateManager and EstateTerrier as they were interested in knowing how much the property was costing them, together with the lease details. The Midlands, Western and North West Boards also took on the software, so that at the point when the health service in Ireland was restructured to form the Health Service Executive, we had our 3i Studio software in use at four of the nine boards.’

Jeremy, who has also been overseeing the project delivery, added: ‘We were invited to make proposals to the national estates directorate as to how we could assist them in making a national property register. We brought together the data from the four boards that had our software and visited the other five and integrated their information into the national property register.’ A key task was to identify any properties that were missing. 3i Studio undertook a detailed cross-referencing with the finance asset register from the nine regional registers. Jeremy said ‘At this point Menika was brought in to work with Gerry Hanley as a full-time resource on the project. One of her earliest tasks was to process a backlog of information on 600 properties to ascertain which had ended-up as an approved outcome and then loading that onto the system. In conjunction with Gerry Hanley, Menika also set up meetings with local health managers and estates managers to verify the property in their area. ‘The software has proved itself scaleable to manage the national database. We’ve been able to support the transition period the health service has been through, as they moved from the disparate hierarchy to a unified approach of storing property information.’

A number of property managers and estates managers now have access to the completed register for ‘read only use’ through 3i Studio’s webMADESimple. Project manager Gerry Hanley concluded: ‘All properties are now logged on. The database covers everything – lease and pricing structures, space utilisation, terms and conditions, and leases – and can be customised to suit any organisational needs. It ranges from a large teaching hospital in Dublin, to residential units for regional and district hospitals, primary care centers, smaller houses and centres in the community. ‘We have on the big picture moved from a regional health structure to a unitary system and 3i Studio has facilitated this restructuring in its support of the estates department’s physical resources.’

Reproduced with kind permission of Hospital Bulletin