Mersey Care NHS Foundation Trust

Challenge

Mersey Care NHS Trust was established in April 2001 to provide specialist in-patient and community health, learning disability and substance misuse services for adults in Liverpool, Southport, Sefton and Kirby. The Trust also provides High Secure, Medium Secure and Low Secure services covering the North West of England, the West Midlands and Wales.

Mitie delivers hard facilities management services to the Trust’s 34 sites. We have delivered these services for the past 18 years, with very little turnover of staff, providing extensive site knowledge and excellent client relationships. We provide all estate maintenance services throughout the portfolio, including Ashworth, Rathbone and Mosley Hill Hospitals, and Residential Homes.

Our key challenge is to provide a proactive service with a rapid response capability in a way that respects building users, minimises disruption and understands the sensitive and high security nature of the facilities.

Solution

There is a site-based Mitie team in Ashworth Hospital consisting of technicians, a maintenance manager and admin support. The rest of the Trust is serviced by a team of mobile technicians, a maintenance manager, admin staff and on-site helpdesk. The dedicated team are responsible for a wide variety of patient environments ranging from high secure units to local day care centres. The services are self-delivered and provided 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, with all works co-ordinated through a central helpdesk.

We minimise disruption to site users through communication and collaboration, understanding the requirements for different facilities. Maintenance tasks for higher security environments, such as Ashworth and the Scott Clinic, are carried out by two-man teams with pre-planned consideration on the tools required for the tasks to be carried out. Additional training is provided to all the Mitie staff in the form of control and restraint training on an annual basis.

Our energy experts have helped our clients to reduce their energy costs, develop smarter ways to manage energy consumption and create tailored energy solutions. We also led the appraisal and installation of voltage optimisation equipment in Heys Court and the Hesketh Centre. We also invested in the fitting of smart metering to the Ashworth site to help improve targeted energy savings and the bill validation.

Outcome

Working in collaboration with the Estates team on various LED lighting projects across the whole Trust properties, we have helped the Trust save money and reduce their carbon footprint. The assessed savings amounted to over 60% compared to the previous installation.

We have also retrofitted the Mitie Building Management Systems which deliver improved monitoring of the buildings’ energy usage. This allows our technicians to optimise the performance of the building services systems, better controlling internal environmental conditions across the sites. This has led to both an improved patient and user experience, as well as reduced running costs.

We worked with the Trust to achieve one of its key objectives, namely developing the procedures and reporting mechanisms to gain ISO 14001 accreditation.

And we have also delivered a number of social value and community benefits while working with Mersey Care. We recruited our team from the local area, including approved regional specialists, SMEs and suppliers, where required. We have also trained up and mentored two members of the team who originally started as labourers to become fully qualified electricians. Additional apprenticeships are also being developed with two further positions anticipated.