HSMA UPDATE
Julian Best, executive property director at The Howard de Walden Estate, on how the Harley Street Medical Area has responded to the challenges of the past year
Welcome to the latest issue of Prognosis, which, for reasons that hardly need explaining, is being distributed as a digital magazine only: just one small example of the adaptations demanded by the current circumstances. As we all know, the past year has been incredibly difficult for people all around the world, and while the vaccine programme is providing some light at the end of the tunnel, it is clear that the months and years to come will also have their challenges. The Harley Street Medical Area (HSMA) is a global healthcare hub and as with our friends and colleagues across the globe, many of our practitioners were hit hard by the effects of the coronavirus pandemic. The first lockdown was particularly difficult. This was especially the case for those practitioners such as GPs, dentists 4—Prognosis
and physiotherapists whose work, which requires close contact with their patients, meant that they reluctantly had to close their doors. The professional bodies which set and oversee the guidelines governing such fields needed time to design new workplace protocols to keep patients and clinicians safe. This meant that it was several months before the practices were allowed to re-open— a very tough period for patients and doctors alike. By June and July, once new protocols had been established and supplies of PPE were less erratic, these practitioners began to welcome patients back in relatively high numbers. While the following lockdowns have been challenging, most clinicians have been able to continue serving their patients, which has been a real credit to their hard work and determination. The situation has been very different for the hospitals in the HSMA, many of which ended up supporting the work of the NHS during the first lockdown. With their international patients traveling here for treatment in far smaller numbers due to the travel restrictions, these institutions were able to place the spare capacity this created at the disposal of their NHS colleagues. They all found this to be a very rewarding experience, with the partnerships they developed with individual NHS hospitals working extremely well. Even after the initial contracts had run their course, institutions like The London Clinic, HCA and Schoen Clinic London—which relocated a significant amount of its technical equipment to the Nightingale Hospital at ExCeL in the Docklands— have continued to work with the NHS to help in any way they can. As well as treating non-COVID patients, there is a considerable job to be done to tackle the backlog of diagnostic and medical procedures that have had to be postponed during the crisis. These partnerships have revealed a real collegiate spirit between the public and private institutions, which it has been wonderful to witness. The Howard de Walden Estate is at heart a property company, and one of the small ways in which we have tried to play our part is in the area of key worker accommodation, which was offered to some staff employed by HSMA hospitals. It started with eight applications granted last year and another seven to be rolled out this year under quite strict criteria. We contact eligible institutions
letting them know that we have some residential apartments available to key workers at a substantial discount on the market rate. They go through an internal selection process to identify workers they think are eligible and then pass their details to us. A lot of frontline staff such as nurses and porters live a long way from where they work and are often working very long hours or finishing late at night. So, if we can provide some accommodation for them closer to their place of work, then it seemed like a worthy thing to do. It is an area we will continue to look at in the future. Elsewhere, while some of our existing plans have been delayed—such as the arrival of Cleveland Clinic’s new consulting suite, which will now open in September this year—there have been some new additions to the area. For example, we have taken a listed building at 73-75 Harley Street and turned it into a multi-disciplinary consulting house with 25 consulting suites working in a variety of specialisms. Something else we are looking very closely at is the area’s current lack of step-down medical facilities: dedicated rehabilitation facilities for post-operative patients who no longer need to be in hospital but still need a little extra help as they recover. A residential facility that provides high quality clinical care and advice is something we know would be welcomed by both patients and their families to help with the transition back into normal life. One very exciting project we are in the very early days of working on is the development of some space for a life sciences facility. This is an extremely interesting and dynamic field, which we believe would complement our primary healthcare services very well. A lot of our consultants teach and undertake research alongside their practices. There is still a lot of work to do but I think it would be wonderful to have life sciences as part of the HSMA offering. Despite the challenging time we are all going through, The Howard de Walden Estate continues to look towards the future, thinking of ways to improve the HSMA’s healthcare offering. The success of the vaccine rollout has given us a route back to normal life and while that may look a bit different to the preCOVID world, there are some exciting projects in the pipeline to ensure that this continues to be one of the world’s leading diagnostic and treatment centres.
