

Technical advisory
Where expertise drives change, delivering solutions fit for the future
Even though the health sector is on the brink of major capital investment, many providers are delivering world class healthcare from facilities in desperate need of modernisation. Your money will still have to work exceptionally hard to transform your health estate while keeping it safe.
Our technical advisors can address every issue you face in delivering a cutting-edge hospital building that’s fit for the future. Our expertise ranges from authoring national policy on intelligent hospitals and pandemic response guidance to providing departmental layouts and technical engineering specifications.
We work directly with you to ensure your facilities are safe and effective by assessing your buildings’ performance and suggesting improvements. And we guide major future healthcare innovations, using our wide technical knowledge to prepare robust, user-friendly and precise business cases that help you pass the UK approval processes.
Business cases – for every stage and level of investment
Archus delivers business cases across the full spectrum of health projects, on projects of less than £5m to over £400m. Our record speaks for itself – we’ve never had a business case rejected by an approval body, be that an Executive Board, NHS England, Department of Health & Social Care or HM Treasury.
We use the Better Business CaseTM approach, centred on the HMT Green Book guidance. This aligns to the Five Case Model, which is the government’s best practice approach for investment decisions, and healthcare business cases also require a sixth Clinical Quality Case. Nine of our team are Better Business CaseTM Practitioners, with detailed understanding of business case theory combined with the practical experience to apply it to real-life projects.
Our business cases are comprehensive, accurate, able to stand up to scrutiny – and will help you gain approval.
Financial analysis – for a robust assessment of public value
Our wide-ranging financial analysis can help you make best use of public investments focused on long-term, sustainable outcomes. We draw on experience from across the health and wider social infrastructure sectors.
Among our work, we’ve developed the economic analysis for an NHS Trust’s Transforming Cancer Services programme, working with stakeholders to estimate whole life costs, quantify direct and societal benefits, and prepare rigorous options appraisals. We’ve worked closely with expert modellers on an income and bed cost model to assess the affordability of new hospital proposals.
Technical authoring – for future hospital design guidance
Our experienced technical authoring team delivers central guidance that helps shape new healthcare buildings.
Continuing over 60 years of NHS hospital design guidance, we are currently updating all Health Building Notes (design) and Health Technical Memoranda (engineering). From inpatient and surgical facilities to ventilation and medical gasses guidance, we collaborate with industry stakeholders to set nationwide best practice.
Archus has also been trusted to develop three of the four ‘ministerial priority’ documents to aid the New Hospital Programme (NHP) schemes – Patient Flow, Intelligent Hospitals and Net Zero Carbon – as well as the NHSE&I’s guidance for ‘intelligent hospitals’. We also worked with partners to deliver the Covid-19 design guidance that supported the Nightingale delivery programme.
When you work with us you benefit from this agenda-setting knowledge and skill.
Assurance reviews – for a future-fit and safe NHS estate
We work with Health Estates Departments to ensure they have the capability, capacity and performance measures to deliver effective and safe support services. All in alignment with statutory standards.
Our external assurance review process focuses on your existing department structure and whether it can fulfil its duties.
Our estates assurance review programme helps you understand whether you have the right Estates services structures to meet statutory standards and deliver a general duty of care for patients, visitors and staff. We’ll look at critical areas to assess your risk management profile, identifying areas of weakness as well as good practice.
Strategic facilities management - for an efficient and resilient estate
Beyond the need to maintain uptime, statutory compliance, safety, security and comfort levels you’re under many more pressures to ensure your facilities operate in a way which is fit for both the current and future delivery of healthcare.
Using a wealth of independent cost and building performance data, industry best practice templates, standards and guidance, we help you embed systems and data into your everyday operations to ensure opportunities are maximised, costs managed and waste eradicated, releasing valuable funding for you to spend on developing projects which support your long term strategy.
Aligning FM strategy with clinical service and business objectives, we will help you make vital decisions on the long-term priorities and approach, creating facilities which are fit for the future.
I hope you grow to support more organisations – you really understand what is required and really put in the hard work to get the job done right.
Hardip Kalirai, Head of Financial Efficiency, NHSE&I
The technical competence of the Archus business case team goes without saying. Archus’ good natured and calming ‘let’s solve this’ attitude was great in facilitating some challenging discussions and helped us achieve in a very tight timescale.
John Sellars, Director of Estates, University Hospitals Birmingham (UHB)
I also want to express my sincere appreciation to the talented team at Archus for their outstanding commitment to this project. Their passion and creativity have been invaluable in bringing our vision to life and I look forward to welcoming our first patients in 2024.
Dr Kirsty Edmondson Jones, Director of Innovation and Infrastructure, Doncaster and Bassetlaw Teaching Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust