While COVID-19 grounded planes all over the world, creating challenges for airlines, airports and their suppliers, ABM has established new opportunities in the healthcare market. As specialists in staffing solutions and customer experience, ABM successfully redeployed hundreds of team members from the aviation segment into the NHS to support COVID-19 related activity.
The move, underpinned by outstanding work for the Royal Free London NHS Foundation Trust, has not only protected jobs in the short term, but has also created an opportunity for future growth within healthcare.
As the scale of the COVID-19 pandemic began to escalate, the additional pressure being placed on UK hospitals was enormous. The demand for additional high touch-point cleaning, deep-cleaning, porterage, and PPE logistics surged as the number of patient admissions continued to increase at a rapid rate. Additionally, a significant number of NHS staff – including critical cleaning teams – were forced to shield or self-isolate, which caused gaps in service delivery.
ABM’s ability to quickly mobilise a flexible operational team with the right skills and competencies through its vetted database provided an opportunity for collaboration. ABM’s first contract in the market was to provide cleaning, porterage services, touchpoint cleaning and housekeeping services to the Royal Free London NHS Foundation Trust.
Dave Cauvin, Commercial Director at ABM Aviation says, “It has been an honour to support the Royal Free London NHS Foundation Trust at such a crucial time in our history. The success of the partnership has been down to the transferable skills and talent for service demonstrated by our team members.”
Jeremy Sharp, Director of Facilities at the Royal Free London NHS Foundation Trust comments: “ABM has not only been able to provide the agility and technical skills needed, but also the necessary empathy and understanding which the environment requires.”
Other considerations included the approach to cleaning during a pandemic. As well as ensuring cleaning of high touchpoints was effective, ABM’s cleaning team also needed to be highly visible to provide assurance to patients and hospital staff and service plans were designed accordingly.
Dave Cauvin continues: “All of our partnerships are based on trust and collaboration, and that approach naturally extends to self-regulation. Through ABM’s Business Intelligence tool “ABI”, we are able to share a dashboard summary of the key aspects of our service delivery, such as percentage of tasks complete, any issues of note, equipment availability, staff presence, training compliance and more.
“This means both our operational managers and our client’s nominated representatives are able to see our team’s status in real time. This is a fresh approach to accountability; simple reporting against clear targets so all parties have absolute confidence in the partnerships we put in place.
“Our breadth of services, backed by 111 years’ experience in facilities services means we can bring real value to the healthcare market, now and in the future.”
ABM has recently been awarded a place on the Eastern Shires Purchasing Organisation (ESPO) cleaning framework. Specialising in providing a wide range of goods and services to the public sector for over 35 years, presence on the ESPO framework provides ABM with more opportunity to bid for further NHS contracts.
For more information, visit www.abm.com.