NHS 10 Year Health Plan set to hold out big opportunities for UK private sector suppliers

The day after the Labour government came to power in the summer of 2024, the newly appointed secretary of state for health and social care, Wes Streeting, declared that the "NHS is broken".

In a plan to turn the National Health Service (NHS) around, the government launched the biggest consultation in the health service's history, seeking views from clinicians, experts, NHS staff and the general public about any and all ideas for fixing the system. The consultation reportedly received over 100,000 views.

Flagship plan imminent

Having digested those views, along with the input of a wide range of stakeholders including various working groups, the government is now due to publish its NHS 10 Year Health Plan. The government's flagship plan to fix the NHS will inform policy decisions across the NHS for years to come. Originally due for publication in the spring, latest reports indicate it is now expected to be published in July  and will focus on the government's aspirations for the NHS.

The 10 Year Health Plan will have huge implications for private sector suppliers who do or could do business with the NHS. The 10-year plan will inform where and how the NHS will look to collaborate with and invest in the private sector from hospital builders to tech developers and pharmaceutical companies. A broad range of opportunities are likely to lie ahead for private sector suppliers.

Strategic shifts

The government published a policy paper in January promising that the plan will deliver three strategic shifts in the way the NHS delivers healthcare. These are "from hospital to community", "from analogue to digital" and "from sickness to prevention".

The plan will be delivered in the context of significant changes to the NHS landscape, including the announcement in March that NHS England will be abolished and its functions brought back under the remit of the Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC). The future role of integrated care systems (ICSs) and integrated care boards (ICBs) is also expected to evolve radically. ICSs and ICBs were set up in 2022 to replace clinical commissioning groups and currently oversee regional budgets and care pathways

'Hospital to community'

Waiting lists for specialist and hospital care and accident and emergency (A&E) departments across the country are sky high. The government wants to ease the pressure on hospitals and A&E by increasing the scope and quality of health care delivered in community settings.

An expansion is expected of the types of treatments that general practitioners (GPs) can deliver, as well as development of new neighbourhood health centres or local hubs where patients can see GPs, district nurses, care workers, physiotherapists and health visitors all in one place.

In the lead up to the plan's launch, there have been some initial  glimpses of what "hospital to community" could involve. 

In April, the government announced the expansion of its "Advice and Guidance" scheme backed by £80 million funding called". The scheme links GPs and hospital specialists together and allows for specialist tests, advice and treatments to be delivered to patients by GPs in local hubs without the need for referral to a consultant and long waiting lists. It was trialled in the latter half of last year with around 660,000 treatments diverted from NHS waiting lists.

Virtual hospitals

The expansion of the "Advice and Guidance" scheme is also thought to include the introduction of "virtual hospitals", whereby GPs and patients can seek advice from consultants directly, including from those situated outside of the GPs and patients home area. It has been reported that one well-placed official described the proposal as "Uber for consultants". 

Speaking at the NHS ConfedExpo earlier this month, the NHS England chair, Dr Penny Dash, said there should be a "much easier way" of GPs getting advice "from anywhere in the country" to help divert a patient from secondary care. 

Outlining the concepts of the idea, Dr Dash said: "It could be, for example, a model whereby you put in your question, let’s initially say as a GP or a practice nurse, it goes into a central repository as it were, and you have a team of [consultants] who are available for that time who are looking at it and responding to it. It doesn’t have to be the [consultant] in your local district general hospital, it could be anyone anywhere in the country". The Health Service Journal has previously reported that it will call for the procurement of technology to be centralised.

Caring for the elderly also represents a major source of pressure on A&Es and hospitals. Pilot trials are underway for new same-day emergency care centres for the specialist assessment and treatment of older patients to save them being admitted into hospitals. 

'Analogue to digital'

Digitalising the NHS has proven to be a significant and costly challenge that successive governments have struggled to achieve. The Health Foundation think tank estimates that it will cost £21 billion to digitalise fully the NHS estate.  Despite this monumental cost, the need for modernisation within the NHS is urgent.

Lord Darzi’s independent investigation of the NHS in England published in September 2024 called out the necessity of a "tilt towards technology" to enhance productivity and leverage the benefits of artificial intelligence (AI) to transform care.  This aligns with the  AI Opportunities Action Plan in which the UK government has committed to accelerating the scale up of promising AI start-ups across all industries and sectors. 

Rolling out new technologies

There are a raft of impressive new digital health technologies already waiting to be deployed and scaled. The 10-year plan is expected to start by rapidly spotting and scaling effective technologies and AI solutions on a national scale. A key part of achieving this is likely to be down to the centralisation of how technology is procured; for example, by having DHSC set the overall strategy for technology and draw up a narrow list of vendors and products for local systems to choose from – that is, a new framework. 

An early indication of what this could look like is to be found in NHS England's guidance published in April on the use of AI-enabled ambient scribing products in health and care settings. The guidance provides a strong steer to NHS buyers across all organisations on what types of technologies they should be buying and how they should be buying it.  More examples of this type of guidance in the plan is expected to be rolled out over the coming weeks and months.

Technology will undoubtedly play a fundamental role in the government's plan, as is evident from the £10bn investment in NHS technology announced in its spending review on 11 June.  At the NHS ConfedExpo, Dr Dash said: "We’ve got to roll out the things that are quick and relatively easy to roll out and do that very, very quickly. For me, that is tech, tech, tech.” 

Tech embrace

A key feature of the technological embrace is likely to be the development of the NHS app, which ministers plan to turn into the "digital front door to the NHS".  Patients will be able to use the app to view test and scan results, book appointments, communicate with doctors, receive information about available treatments and clinical trials, and choose which hospital or clinic they want to go to based on official ratings and current waiting times.

Developments in AI technology are also expected to play an important part in the plan. One example is the use of ambient voice technology that can transcribe conversations between doctors and patients so notes and letters do not need to be manually typed.

For patients, it is expected that they will benefit from the increased use of "wearable" technology – devices that alleviate the need for hospital visits by monitoring the patient's vital signs such as heart rate and blood pressure.

Of course, technological development comes at a cost.  As well as the £10bn investment in NHS technology, the plan will also include financial incentives for hospitals to reinvest surplus money in new technology, such as surgical robots, which can help to boost productivity.

Create a single patient record

Creating a single patient record has been long desired, with patients having one record that follows them around wherever they have treatment, from GPs to dentists, A&E and specialist care. The single patient record is key to the plan, but the NHS has historically faced challenges in realising this bold vision due to data being fragmented across multiple sources. The Data (Use and Access) Act 2025 will help address these challenges by making information standards mandatory for all suppliers of IT services to the health and care system, ensuring health and care data is recorded and managed in the same way.   

If the plan is able to deliver on this objective, it will pave the way for DHSC to bring together a single patient record and help unlock DHSC's ability to make anonymised patient data available to enable development of new treatments, which the government is reportedly interested in doing. 

This could in turn see the government adopt the recommendations of the Sudlow review, which advocates NHS patient data being treated as critical national infrastructure, with a new body with independent leadership that is responsible for holding the data in secure data environments.

The plan and the introduction of common standards for health records pave the way for NHS app to become the single patient record.

Federated Data Platform expansion

Another key part of the plan will likely be the continued expansion of the Federated Data Platform (FDP). The FDP was procured in 2023 to be the NHS' standardised digital platform, under which every trust holds its data under its own version of the FDP, which it can then share easily with other trusts when required. 

As it stands, while all NHS trusts are signed up to FDP, usage among these trusts remains mixed. Trusts are not mandated to use FDP for all their data needs and indeed some report better outputs from alternative technologies. A recent example is the launch of Cancer360 on the FDP, which is a digital tool that helps clinicians identify and address delays in cancer treatment pathways. While other tools are available and trusts are not mandated to use Cancer360, the Health Service Journal has reported that NHS England will have "a conversation" about the need to use Cancer360 if an NHS trust has another system in place and was not meeting standards.  The plan is anticipated to double down on the government's investment in FDP and commit to expand its functionality.

'Sickness to prevention'

The government wants to invest more in preventative treatments and medicines to reduce the amount it spends on treating costly diseases. For example, the NHS' investment in tech initiatives such as data collected by wearable technology links to this objective by allowing GPs to remotely monitor conditions such as diabetes and high blood pressure, and proactively offer advice before a patient becomes unwell. 

The initiatives would likely be drawn from the pool of promising AI star-tups being pushed through to scale up by the AI Opportunities Action Plan, as well as the Medicine and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency's AI Airlock (a regulatory sandbox being used by developers of AI as a medical device).

Osborne Clarke comment

The government has been open in its view that, if the NHS is to survive, it must be reformed. The 10-year plan will tell us how it intends to carry out this reform. It will be a pivotal document that will shape the future of healthcare in the UK over the next decade and potentially beyond.

Additionally, following the government's  spending review, the NHS is set to receive a funding increase of 3% annually. The government is committed to transforming the system by shifting from analogue to digital, treatment to prevention, and hospital to community care. This plan includes investing up to £10 billion in NHS technology and digital transformation by 2028-29, as well as allocating at least £80 million per year to initiatives such as tobacco cessation programmes, aimed at reducing demand on the NHS.

We expect there to be a wealth of opportunities for the private sector, but as with any public sector entity, companies need to understand the unique regulatory and legislative landscape in which the NHS operates in order to take full advantage of those opportunities. 

James Lister, a solicitor apprentice with Osborne Clarke, contributed to this Insight.