Smarter use of NHS buildings is becoming essential as services shift closer to communities. Christopher King, head of NHS Open Space, explains how data‑driven space management is helping the health service boost utilisation, cut costs and deliver care more efficiently across the estate

The NHS estate offers an extraordinary opportunity to reshape healthcare delivery and bring services closer to communities. By embracing innovative technology and smarter space management, we can unlock efficiencies, reduce costs, and reinvest savings into better patient care. 

Our experts at NHS Property Services (NHSPS) have been at the forefront of developing new technology to help find efficiencies for the NHS. We launched NHS Open Space in 2019 ⁠- a space management solution dedicated to helping estate leaders make smarter use of healthcare spaces and bring services closer to the communities that need them. Our powerful digital tools show how and when space is being used so it can be managed effectively, improving service delivery, reducing costs and optimising the estate.  
 
NHS Open Space does this by monitoring how space used, gathering and analysing huge swathes of data on space and usage so estate leaders can plan how to increase utilisation or adapt how the space is used. The solution also provides a digital platform that allows both internal healthcare teams and third-party healthcare providers to easily book clinical and non-clinical rooms across England. This helps increase flexibility and agility and prevents space being left unused. 

NHSPS published a report in December outlining practical and cost-effective advice for local NHS providers to deliver many of the proposed Neighbourhood Health Centres (NHCs) across England, part of the Government's NHS Neighbourhood Rebuild Programme.    
 
The report, “Making Neighbourhood Health Centres a Reality: Optimising the Existing Estate”, responds to the Government’s 10 Year Health Plan and its commitment to deliver at least 100 NHCs by 2030.   
 
The centres - set to be open 12 hours a day, six days a week - are designed to bring together numerous health and wellbeing services under one roof and away from acute hospital settings.  

The report suggests fully utilising the existing estate through refurbishment and space optimisation and increasing utilisation by leveraging digital solutions such as NHS Open Space to enable multi-service use of space to significantly improve productivity and patient access.   

NHS Open Space is available throughout the NHS and is already actively helping ICBs and Trusts to deliver the three shifts of the 10 Year Health Plan, by moving care from hospitals to communities, making better use of technology, and focussing on preventing ill health. Again, we are seeing strong value-generating results from this.  

Since 2019, 500 healthcare organisations have delivered more than 10 million patient consultations within communities. Around 150 different services use NHS Open Space on a flexible basis, a majority being GPs, community health services, mental health services, physiotherapy, audiology and eye screening. We also support charitable organisations, having provided £4.8 million of discounted space to facilitate services to the heart of communities. 

NHS Open Space provides data on user behaviours, enabling customers to align space with service provision and reduce costs. Greater Manchester Mental Health Foundation Trust has achieved a 32 per cent cost saving on their flexible usage through NHS Open Space. New customer, HCRG Care Group, has grown their operations in the last 12 months, providing 18 services in 11 NHSPS properties through NHS Open Space. 

At Sudbury Medical Centre, we fitted sensors to the 62 rooms and 77 desks and calculated the site utilisation was 40 per cent. The site had been considering an extension for additional services. However, the 12-week study demonstrated this was not needed and could be provided within the existing estate - saving a huge expenditure on an unnecessary building.   

Since 2020, NHS Open Space has helped NHSPS steadily increase utilisation from 19 per cent to 41.2 per cent by using its data insights and intuitive room management system. This has led to a £35.8million reduction in costs to ICBs and Trusts and has driven £5m of additional revenue for the NHS to date.  

Community Health Partnerships (CHP) has adopted NHS Open Space’s booking system to increase space utilisation and reduce the administrative burden of space management. The pilot of which achieved a 66.4 per cent increase in cost recovery and a 100 per cent reduction in time spent registering new users. As a multi-landlord booking platform, NHS Open Space enables service providers to access space across multiple landlord’s estates.  

One of our latest projects is with Southeast London ICB and CHP, it aims to pool utilisation data, so a single dashboard is available to analyse utilisation across the entire estate. This means we can then look for trends in usage and use those to help reduce costs and increase efficiency.   

NHS Open Space belongs to a wider NHSPS services offer, providing NHS leaders with expert advice and consultancy support for all property related matters. As such, we can provide step-by-step support throughout the lifecycle of NHS properties. This is becoming increasingly sought out, as more than half of NHS leaders surveyed by us for our Estate Optimisation Guide, stated they lacked the right data to make informed decisions, and a third said they lack the expertise to make the right changes to their estate. We are here to help. 

The potential for energy efficiency by using NHS Open Space is an additional positive impact for users. In 2020 the NHS committed to Net Zero, with an 80 per cent reduction by 2028 to 2032. NHS Open Space can help ICBs, and Trusts deliver this as by knowing where buildings are empty, energy savings can be made.   
 
Our Green Plan, launched last year (2025), aims to assess what we have achieved since 2022, what our goals are and how the plan will impact our customers. Part of this plan is to help NHSPS colleagues and customers to use data to reduce utility costs, carbon emissions, and environmental impact.   
 
In conclusion, NHS Open Space is a solution designed to help the whole of the NHS estate unlock its full potential so that space is better used, and new services are delivered faster and at a reduced cost. Healthcare is shifting with patients seeking a wider range of flexible treatments, speedily and closer to home; modifying the existing estate by smarter use of its space is what the NHS needs to do to meet the current demands of the NHS.