The Infrastructure Podcast: Episode 178

Guests: Emma Whigham, Hospital 2.0 Alliance Director, Martin John, Strategic Director for Kings Lynn and James Paget, James Britt, Programme Director, Skanska

Bringing Hospital 2.0 to life

In this episode are back with the latest in our series exploring the New Hospital Programme (NHP), the single largest investment in NHS infrastructure in recent decades. 

Hopefully you have caught the first two episodes on the programme published last February and December in which we explored the immense scale of this massive national endeavour and set out how the supply chain is gearing up to support the ambitious £37bn Hospital 2.0 industrialised delivery programm.

Since our last podcast in February this year, ten delivery partners have been announced to work on the eleven projects in wave one of the programme which will be completed by 2033. In total three project delivery waves will see the huge programme stretch out to the mid 2040s. 

Today, we are stepping into the operational reality of how these state-of-the-art facilities will actually be delivered on the ground and how this bold Hospital 2.0 Alliance will actually work in practice.

So lots to talk through and to unpack and to do that I am joined by a panel representing one part of the new Hospital 2.0 Alliance: Emma Whigham, the NHP Hospital 2.0 Alliance Director, Martin John, Strategic Director for Kings Lynn and James Paget hospital trust, and James Britt, Programme Director at construction partner, Skanska.

Some context – historically, and as explained in our last two podcasts, NHS hospitals were built individually by autonomous trusts under a fragmented approach that frequently led to budget overruns and timeline delays. The new (H2A) Hospital 2.0 Alliance Framework aims to completely rewrites that playbook. 

By replacing traditional, often adversarial procurement with a 12-year collaborative ecosystem, NHP is backing an industrialised approach, leveraging standardisation, off-site manufacturing, and repeatable designs to speed up construction and drive value.

But moving from theory to practice is highly complex. It demands an entirely new culture of transparency, shared risk, and collective resilience. 

So let’s dive in with the folk on the front line and explore how this radical approach actually is set to change things for frontline clinical staff, deliver consistent long term value for taxpayers and crucially, improve patient outcomes.

The Infrastructure Podcast

All episodes