Modern healthcare construction is governed by tight regulations which ensure precision design and delivery of complex healthcare facilities to meet the needs of patients and trusts in the face of continually changing clinical requirements.
Health Technical Agreements (HTMs) and Health Building Notes (HBNs) are NHS England guidance documents which ensure best practice in healthcare construction design and delivery across the UK.
What Are HTMs and HBNs?
These guidance documents ensure healthcare construction projects meet the precise clinical functionality requirements of their intended operational use and the technical requirements demanded by modern healthcare facilities.
- Health Building Notes (HBNs) are a detailed set of documents which provide specific design guidance for clinical environments. These documents, which focus on layout, patient flow, privacy, infection control, and adaptability, ensure all healthcare facilities meet the needs of their intended use, from A&Es to mental health provision to intensive care facilities.
- Health Technical Memoranda (HTMs) focus on the delivery of healthcare construction projects and detail engineering and technical standards for systems including ventilation, water safety, fire protection, and medical gas pipelines. These guidelines ensure that all healthcare construction contractors uphold consistent safety and efficiency standards across both medical infrastructure and patient-facing areas.
Why are UK healthcare regulations important for healthcare construction projects?
These regulations and guidance documents ensure that all healthcare construction projects are safety and efficiency compliant and offer fit for purpose healthcare facilities regardless of trust or contractor.
The regulations govern several factors which ensure consistency of provision across the NHS including:
- Patient safety: HTMs and HBNs embed infection control, fire safety, and accessibility into the design and delivery of every building.
- Regulatory compliance: In most cases, adhering to these standards is required for planning approval and funding under NHS capital programmes. It is essential that a healthcare construction contractor has a full and in depth understanding of these regulations throughout the lifetime of a development.
- Operational efficiency: In the longer term, healthcare facilities built to HTM/HBN standards are easier to maintain, more energy-efficient, and better suited to evolving clinical needs.
- Future-proofing: These guidelines help ensure buildings can adapt to future healthcare development and changing patient needs, for example through ensuring facilities are constructed ‘plug-and-play ready’ for digital integrations.
HTMs and HBNs are vital tools which should be intricately understood by design and delivery teams to ensure clinical and operational healthcare spaces are safe, fit-for-purpose and future ready.