Northern Care Alliance NHS Foundation Trust (NCA) brings together staff and services from Salford Royal NHS Foundation Trust and The Pennine Acute Hospitals NHS Trust, covering Bury; Heywood, Middleton and Rochdale; Oldham; and Salford’s hospitals and community premises. Through its integrated model, NCA delivers a wide range of health services across both hospital and community settings to over one million people.
The challenge
Managed by NHS Property Services, the bookable space used by NCA was onboarded to NHS Open Space (Open Space) to simplify its management and support smarter utilisation. By adopting Open Space’s flexible booking system, NCA gained the ability to manage both ad-hoc and recurring clinical room bookings more effectively across the region — helping them meet rising patient demand.
Before this transition, NCA relied on manual room management processes that offered limited visibility and lacked the robust reporting needed to optimise space usage. This made it difficult to coordinate clinical provision across care organisations and ensure rooms were consistently aligned with service needs.
The solution
Open Space quickly became embedded in NCA’s community delivery model. Today, services across the trust use the platform to book recurring and ad-hoc clinical rooms to support their service delivery, with many sites supporting multiple specialisms and disciplines.
Bookings are managed directly by the services themselves, while the Estates and Asset Officer and Community Estates Leads provide local support and utilisation reporting to help identify areas where utilisation could be improved and ensure resources are used efficiently.
The platform’s intuitive interface makes it easy to book, amend, or cancel rooms, while the reporting features allow for better oversight of how and when space is being used.
The results
NCA has seen clear operational and strategic benefits from adopting Open Space, including:
- Increased clinical capacity: Community Services can run more clinics by accessing ad-hoc space in NHSPS buildings as needed.
- Improved flexibility: Services can adapt their room usage to match patient demand, without needing permanent access or long-term leases.
- Smarter space planning: With detailed reports and insight into booking trends, teams can make data-driven decisions around future space usage.
- Optimised resource use: The trust can assess underused space and look at opportunities for collaboration across services to improve overall efficiency.
- Stronger support: Having dedicated account management from the Open Space team, particularly Portfolio Manager, Darren Fahy, has provided reassurance and expert support throughout.
A trusted platform for healthcare providers
For any NHS organisation managing community or outpatient services across multiple sites, Open Space offers a practical, scalable, and cost-effective solution.
The support and partnership from the Open Space team — including Portfolio Managers Darren Fahy and Jessica Nicander — have made a lasting impact.
