UK Government announce new 10 Year Plan for the NHS

• Expanding the NHS App to make it easier to manage appointments, get information and give feedback.
• A new Choice Charter for patients, which will be rolled out first in the areas of highest health need, alongside easy-to-understand league tables that rank providers against key quality indicators.
• Bringing parts of the patient voice ‘in house’ into the Department of Health and Social Care, creating a new National Director of Patient Experience, incorporating the functions of Healthwatch England (which is to be abolished) and reform of the complaints process.
• Testing new ways that patient voice can directly impact financial flows within the NHS, including ‘patient power payments’ to allow patients to hold back some of the payment for their care if they are not satisfied with how their care has been delivered.
• Collecting patient reported experience and outcomes measures (PREMs and PROMs) in a more systematic and comparable way and wider usage of patient reported outcome measures.

• A range of commitments to make the NHS ‘the best employer’, including personalised career development plans for all staff, acceleration of the Messenger Review recommendations to improve leadership culture, and new minimum standards for modern employment.
• A focus on creating 1,000 new speciality training posts over the next 3 years, and an ambition to reduce international recruitment to less than 10% by 2035.
• New freedoms for leaders and managers to reward high performance and to act on underperformance, including through pay and reward.
• A new 10 Year Workforce Plan, published later this year to replace the 2023 long-term workforce plan – with less emphasis on growing the workforce and more on shifting staff skill mix and harnessing technology to free up staff time to care.

• Streamlined national oversight, with fewer arm’s length bodies, a reduction in targets and micro-management, and a commitment to devolve more power to local NHS organisations.
• Changes to how local services are planned and commissioned, with a more focused role for ICBs as strategic commissioners and the abolition of integrated care partnerships (opens in a new tab) (ICPs).
• Reforms to health care providers, with a renewed push for NHS trusts to achieve foundation status and the development of new integrated health organisations (IHOs).

• Shifting the pattern of health spending, with the share of expenditure on hospital care falling and proportionally greater investment in out of-hospital care.
• Establishing a neighbourhood health centre in every community, starting in places where healthy life expectancy is lowest, and the government is considering the use of public–private partnerships (PPP) to support these centres.
• Introducing two new GP contracts, with roll-out beginning in 2026: one to create ‘single neighbourhood providers’ that deliver enhanced services for groups with similar needs over a single neighbourhood, and another to create ‘multi-neighbourhood providers’ that will deliver care across several different neighbourhoods.

• A transformation of the NHS App to include a wide variety of new functions, designed to help people manage their health and care, with increased health information and signposting to services.
• Revisiting the HealthStore to enable patients to have access a variety of health apps, paid for by the NHS.
• A recommitment to roll out the ‘single patient record’ with legislation planned to give patients the right to access their record, place a duty on providers to record information into it and allow data to be used for research and service improvement.
• Rollout of a range of technological tools for staff, including artificial intelligence (AI) scribes as a key feature of the future care model, framed in the plan as a means to increased productivity.

Key proposals for analogue to digital shift

• A transformation of the NHS App to include a wide variety of new functions, designed to help people manage their health and care, with increased health information and signposting to services.
• Revisiting the HealthStore to enable patients to have access a variety of health apps, paid for by the NHS.
• A recommitment to roll out the ‘single patient record’ with legislation planned to give patients the right to access their record, place a duty on providers to record information into it and allow data to be used for research and service improvement.
• Rollout of a range of technological tools for staff, including artificial intelligence (AI) scribes as a key feature of the future care model, framed in the plan as a means to increased productivity.

• Taking action on some of the determinants of health, including introducing mandatory food sales reporting for all large companies in the food sector, targets to increase the healthiness of food sales; piloting integration of employment advisors and work coaches into the neighbourhood health service.
• Continuing to roll out mental health support teams for children in schools, with full national coverage by 2029/30.
• Testing new delivery models for secondary prevention through the neighbourhood health service – selected integrated care boards (ICBs) will be designated ‘prevention accelerators’ focusing on community-led methods to tackle variation in uptake of interventions for cardiovascular disease (CVD) and diabetes.
• ICBs will be expected to develop population health improvement plans with local partners.
• Creation of a new genomics population health service, accessible to all – to use genomic information to enable early identification and intervention for individuals at high risk of developing common diseases.
• Support for English devolution and aligning ICB and strategic authority boundaries to drive co-ordinated action on the wider determinants of health, with new permissions for Greater Manchester to go further, faster.