Building and Estate Maintenance Services

Creating Calm in Critical Moments

When a patient comes into hospital for an appointment or an operation, it is often a worrying time for them and the most important part of their day. Quite rightly, they shouldn’t be focused on our heating and lighting systems in theatre, or whether there will be a power outage during their visit, but instead focused on receiving the treatment they need.

The Backbone of Clinical Care

This is why the NTH Solutions Estates and Building Maintenance function is so critical – our clinical colleagues could not deliver the levels of care they do without the work our colleagues do to proactively manage the fabric and systems within our buildings, for example ensuring there is a constant supply of heating, electricity or hot water.

Ready When It Matters Most

Equally, our various teams are on hand to respond to emergencies if they happen, with carefully planned and tested resilience systems in place in the background to ensure care delivery is seamless.

Skilled Trades Supporting Every Corner of Care

We have a breadth of our expertise across our workforce, including Mechanical Engineers and Fitters, Plumbers, Electrical Engineers, Building Engineers, Joiners, Painters, Decorators, Gardeners and other various trades, alongside our Supervisors who oversee our operations with military precision!

Our Estates team received nearly

40,000

work requests in 2024/25

Electrical Team

We employ a team of highly skilled Electricians who manage the electrical requirements of our hospital and community-based sites in-house. Many of them joined us as school-leaver Apprentices and have developed the highly specialist skills required to deliver electrical services in a unique hospital environment over a number of years. Quite simply, they are critical to the safe and effective running of our services – we couldn’t look after the patients in our care without a reliable electricity supply and fully functioning electrical circuits.

This team works both proactively to ensure we have a consistent power supply, as well as reactively in terms of responding to emergencies if they happen.

Our on-site electricity supply

There are two electrical sources that supply our hospitals, with the feeds going into various sub-stations for management and onward distribution across our estates. We also have diesel generators on-site in our Energy Centres based at the University Hospital of North Tees and University Hospital of Hartlepool which kick in in the event of a power failure, ensuring that there is always a consistent source of electricity to keep our services operating 24/7. We proactively maintain and test these for resilience purposes. We affectionately refer to these within our Estates team as our ‘building life support machines’ – you don’t know that they’re there, but they’re continually running in the background to ensure that our buildings and colleagues are always able to function.

We also proactively conduct five-yearly fixed wiring inspections to ensure all distribution boards are compliant with relevant fire and electrical safety regulations although, given the size of our estates, this is something we’re continually working on.

In 2024/25, our Estates team undertook nearly

15,000

planned preventative maintenance (PPM) jobs

to ensure our buildings and services remain safe and compliant

Mechanical Team

Keeping Vital Services Flowing

This is a another critical function within our Estates department, with our highly skilled team of mechanical tradespeople ensuring that we always have a consistent supply of heating, hot and cold water, and steam available for use across our hospital and community sites. They include Plumbers, Mechanical Fitters and Heating Engineers who, between them, have decades of experience working in a very specialist environment.

Powering Our Sites Behind the Scenes

As well as managing the operations at our on-site Energy Centres at both the University Hospital of North Tees and the University Hospital of Hartlepool where we have facilities including steam boilers, gas-fired generators, diesel generators and compressed air sources, our teams are responsible for maintaining miles of service tunnels and ducts across our estates, through which hot water, heating and steam is distributed to wards, operating theatres, consulting rooms and offices.

Proactive Maintenance That Protects Patients

Planned, proactive maintenance of our critical systems is a priority for this team to ensure that no matter what, our hospitals and community sites are able to deliver a seamless service to patients. For example, they maintain all hospital ventilation systems including in the Critical Care and Theatres departments, ensuring these are safe and compliant for patient care. Equally, the team proactively works to ensure hot water systems remain safe and free of bacteria through regular temperature maintenance, and system flushing and sampling.

In 2024/25, our Estates team unblocked nearly

1,400

drains and toilets!

Building Team, including Minor New Works

General building maintenance

This team looks after all general maintenance activities across our hospital and community sites, as well as the general fabric of the buildings. They carry out tasks such as building walls, pointing, basic joinery, keeping on top of roof maintenance and other such jobs.

Joinery

This skilled team performs a large number of joinery and carpentry tasks across our hospital and community sites. One of its main functions is maintaining all of our fire doors, ensuring these are always in full working order and compliant with relevant Fire Safety regulations and laws.

Decoration

This team of skilled tradespeople carry out a broad range of painting and decorating services, as well as take responsibility for our hygiene services, for example the provision of safe hospital flooring and other surface coverings that meet with all relevant health, fire and safety regulations. You will notice this team’s work everywhere you look across our hospital sites, for example if you visit a consulting room or stay on a ward.

Grounds maintenance

We employ a team of Gardeners to manage the maintenance across the grounds of our hospital sites at North Tees, Hartlepool and Peterlee, alongside some of our community sites. This includes keeping the grass cut and flowers planted, alongside ensuring things like gutters, drains and pipes are in good working order. It’s vital we keep this under control.

Our Painting & Decorating team uses on average

240

pots of paint a month

to keep our hospitals looking fresh!

In 2024/25, our Joiners repaired

3,996