Delivering 20+ Procurements in 18 Months for Imperial College Healthcare

Imperial College Healthcare NHS Trust (ICHT) is delivering one of the most ambitious hospital redevelopment programmes in the country. A new state-of-the-art acute hospital, the Paddington Life Sciences cluster, and the Fleming Centre (a world-first hub dedicated to tackling antimicrobial resistance), at St Mary’s, alongside major works at Charing Cross, Hammersmith, and Queen Charlotte’s and Chelsea. Across five major sites in London, it is one of the most complex capital programmes in NHS history.

To bring this vision to life, ICHT needed to appoint high-performing design, development, and construction partners across more than 20 procurements. The Trust needed a procurement partner capable of working at pace, across multiple live workstreams simultaneously, without compromising on compliance or quality.

The scale of the programme created pressures that go beyond what most procurement teams face. Multiple high-value, interdependent procurements were running in parallel. This included six concurrent mini-competitions for St Mary’s design teams and eight parallel procurements across three other hospital sites. Cabinet Office spending controls required formal OBC approval before the Fleming Centre main contractor ITT could launch.

EcoVate was appointed as ICHT’s strategic procurement partner, providing structured support across all programmes and functioning as a senior embedded extension of the Trust’s own team. Each procurement was designed to suit the project’s scale and scope. A single senior consultant served as the Trust’s point of contact across every workstream.

EcoVate delivered over 20 compliant procurements in 18 months, including 14 design team appointments and the timely Cabinet Office approval of the Fleming Centre OBC. Every procurement was delivered on time and met all NHS governance and regulatory audit standards.