East Genomics

Mobile menu open

UK Government announce new 10 Year Plan for the NHS

On 3 July 2025, the Government published its 10 Year Health Plan for England, setting out ambitions for the NHS over the next 10 years.

NHS 10 Year Plan 2025

The case for change

Many have described the NHS as being in a 'critical condition', with public satisfaction having fallen from 70% in 2010 to 21%.

Productivity within the NHS is down 20-25% post-COVID and many parts of it are financially unsustainable.

There are also the demographic challenges of an ageing population, with 25% of people in this country having a long-term condition, which accounts for 65% of NHS spending.

However, despite these challenges, the 10 Year Plan represents a transformational opportunity. With unparalleled access to population health data, a digital healthcare revolution driving genomics leadership and new era of patient choice, there is much to be optimistic about.

There are three key ambitions set out in the 10 Year Plan.

  • Shifting care from hospitals into the community
  • Shifting from analogue to digital
  • Shifting from treating sickness to prevention

Below we pull out some of the key parts of the 10 Year Plan, and explain what it means for the role of genomics moving forward.

You can read the full 10 Year Plan here (opens in a new tab), as well as anExecutive Summary (opens in a new tab) and an Easy Read Version (opens in a new tab).

What does the plan mean for patients?
  • 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.
What does the plan mean for staff and leaders?
  • 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.
What does the plan mean for systems and finance?
  • 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).

Three major shifts

What does the plan mean for shifting care from hospital to community?
  • 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.
What does the plan mean for shifting care from analogue to digital and pursuing innovation?
  • 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.
What does the plan mean for shifting from treatment to prevention?
  • 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.

Five ‘big bets’ set to accelerate health care reform through innovation

Following from the prioritisation of technology, the section on innovation in the plan also places five big bets on ‘the most direct and impactful technological levers for transforming NHS care delivery’. These are:

  • data quality and interoperability for research and innovation
  • AI tools
  • genomics and predictive analytics
  • wearables
  • robotics

The role of genomics

With over 100 mentions of genomics within the new 10 Year Plan for the NHS, it is clear that genomic medicine, along with the other four 'big bets', will play a central role in the transformation of the NHS over the next decade. There are exciting possibilities here that could bring real benefits to people, particularly the signalling of a shift in how genomics is used, from something at the very specialist end of treating cancers and rare diseases, to ambitions for it to be used ‘in routine preventive care’ and to ‘mainstream genomics population health’.

Here are some examples of how genomics will play a key role:

Genomics population health service

  • The NHS Genomics Medicine Service will expand the population health testing it already provides and will shorten testing times further. Continuing expansion of the NHS’ whole genome sequencing programme, with a focus on risks relating to common disease areas including cardiovascular, renal and diabetes .

Polygenic risk scores (PRS)

  • Population based PRS alongside other emerging diagnostic tools will enable early identification and intervention for individuals at high risk of developing common diseases. A 2021 NHS trial showed that adding PRS to standard clinical workflows in CVD worked well.
  • Multi-disease PRS technology is already being used for up to 5 million participants via the Our Future Health (opens in a new tab) programme. By embedding genomic insight into digital pathways, the NHS can triage risk earlier, target screening and guide prescribing based on personalised profiles.
  • Expansion of genomic testing for inherited causes of major diseases to allow earlier detection and intervention, including cancer (e.g. BRCA1/2 genes), and cardiovascular disease predisposition (e.g. familial hypocholesteraemia). Integratiion of genomic insights into cardiovascular disease prevention and care through a trial with Our Future Health implementing Integrated Risk Scores (which bring together genomics and other non-biological risk factors) in neighbourhood health services, expanding to all 5 million participants in the Our Future Health programme. Subject to evaluation, this will be rolled out to other conditions like diabetes, breast, bowel and prostate cancer, and dementia.

Universal newborn genomic testing and whole genome sequencing

  • Building on the Genomics England-led Generation Study (opens in a new tab) which is currently recruiting up to 100,000 newborn babies and screening them for over 200 genetic conditions.
  • The document also sets out plans for a new large-scale study to sequence the genomes of 150,000 adults.

Pharmacogenomics

  • Pharmacogenomics is the study of how genes affect a person’s response to drugs. This field combines pharmacology (the science of drugs) and genomics (the study of genes and their functions) to develop effective, safe medications that can be prescribed based on a person’s genetic makeup. One example of it's application in the NHS is the My Medicines tool which will guide patients on drug interactions to help avoid adverse drug reactions (estimated to cost NHS ~£2.2 billion per year).
  • Integration of genomic testing for pharmacogenomic profiles into the NHS over-40s Health Check with monitoring of uptake across different communities. Also the use of pharmacogenomic insights in mental health prescribing will be a priority.

Neighbourhood Health Service

  • Support prevention of disease through the use of technology and genomic insights. By 2035 the ambition is to incorporate genomic data, digital tools and technology and a single patient record supplemented by advances in genomic data, to enable personalised predictive care.
  • Training of new Genomics Champions in the neighbourhood, in conjunction with the NHS Genomic Medicine Service, will aim to increase the uptake of genomic testing and adjust neighbourhood skill mixes to reflect genomic data.