Transforming Primary Care: The Smart GP Practice in South Cumbria

Primary care is the foundation of the NHS, providing the most care encounters across the UK’s health service. Despite operating at significant levels of productivity, investment into primary care and its ageing estates hasn’t kept pace. With increased pressure on output, rising staff costs, the green agenda, and the cost of the built environment, primary care is in desperate need of attention.

The built environment in health and care delivery

When it comes to transformation, there’s no doubt that we need to do it all — clinical systems and the built environment together. But the idea that everything can go virtual isn’t realistic right now. People need to visit their GP, hospital, and local health centre, and that experience needs to be as comfortable, efficient, and cost-effective as possible.

That means getting the basics right, such as air quality, heating, lighting, but also combining it with smarter building management. Looking further ahead, the possibilities are genuinely exciting. Remote sensing, biometrics, monitoring patients as they move through a building...it's technology that already exists in other industries, and it’s time for healthcare to catch up.

Transforming Sedbergh Medical Practice with a light retrofit model

In partnership with The Lister Alliance and Cisco, we undertook a light retrofit digital transformation project at Sedbergh Medical Practice in South Cumbria. Our practice was the first of three GP sites to pilot sensing, power monitoring, and smartlighting technologies, aiming to improve the staff and patient experience, promote cost and energy savings, and align with the NHS’s net zero goals.

Being a live practice, patients still needed to be seen, so all the work had to happen as efficiently as possible. The whole thing was done over a couple of weekends with minimal drilling, channelling, or hardwiring necessary. For a 4,000-patient practice in South Cumbria, if we can do it without disruption, so can anyone.

The technology implemented throughout the practice monitors conditions room by room: temperature, humidity, CO2, particulate matter, and occupancy, all visible in real time on a single dashboard. It can even flag a Velux window left open at the end of the day. You can log on and see exactly how every room in the building is performing, at the click of a button. That simply wasn't possible before. The energy-efficient lighting installed in the waiting room is expected to pay back its cost within three years. 

Real-time data like this not only supports the day-to-day operations and management of the building but also makes the case for future investment. Primary care has always had plenty of stories about inefficiency and wasted space. But having a strong quantitative evidence base on how patients actually use clinical space will enable us to start to predict what right-sized primary care premises should look like going forward.

Public-private partnerships make transformation possible

The built environment is the second biggest cost in a healthcare provider's model, after staffing, and yet it's historically not been the first place we look for efficiency gains — this has to change. Transformation at this scale doesn't happen overnight, and it doesn't happen without the right partners.

Bringing in industry expertise, technology, knowledge, and investment through the likes of Cisco and The Lister Alliance is how the NHS closes that gap. The proof of concept here at Sedbergh Medical Practice highlights the clear impact digital transformation has on primary care settings, the data we need to collect, and the lessons to learn in order to scale nationwide and bring care closer to home.

Read full project report here.