Prevention in Practice: How Neighbourhood Health Services can Transform the NHS
A conference fringe event celebrated the launch by the Government of its ambitious new 10 Year Neighbourhood Health Plan.
Matthew Taylor, CEO of the NHS Confederation (of healthcare providers) and Stephen Kinnock, MP, Minister of State for Health and Social Care joined with Rob Yeldon, Director of the Chartered Society of Physiotherapists, Camilla Hawthorn, Chair of the Royal College of GPs and Julia Worthington, Integrated Neighbourhoods Lead at the General Medical Council to discuss implementing the plan.
Listening to the speakers, this brave initiative will transform health and social care for the good of all – but it will take time, ingenuity, cooperation and determination to bring it about.
The new model is based on several key principles:
- Prevention is better than cure.
- It’s no good waiting for a crisis – early intervention improves lives and saves money for the health and social care budget.
- Bringing services (and costs) out of secondary care (hospitals) and into primary care centres will improve patient access and so lead to early diagnosis and treatment.
- Rehabilitation gets people back to their work and their daily lives and saves money on social care.
- Place-based care allows tailoring of provision to suit local needs.
- GPs will still be a vital point of contact for patients.
There will be challenges! One of them is the fragmented nature of health and social care provision: local authorities, integrated care boards, primary care networks, hospital trusts and others must all work together to achieve this goal. The speakers were surprisingly upbeat about the possibilities of cooperation between different service providers. There are several examples of successful joint ventures around the country and the Government has already set up 43 multi-disciplinary pilot schemes.
There are also different funding streams through hospitals, primary care (GPs) and social care. I asked if the special nature of GP funding – GPs are not directly employed by the NHS – would get in the way of integration. Camilla Hawthorne thought not and pointed to existing cooperation between GPs and other services.
Camilla Hawthorne and Julia Worthington both stressed the need for determined inspirational leadership to take the scheme forward.
Stephen Kinnock seemed very much in charge of his brief and aware of the challenges and ways of dealing with them. Points he made included:
- Social prescribing is an important element of the plan (although he was reminded that there had to be services available to prescribe into).
- 600 people every day leave work to take up family caring responsibilities.
- There is a cross-departmental group of ministers looking into the situation of unpaid carers.
- The Government will provide a member of staff trained in mental health in every school.
- The Government will provide 8,500 more mental health professionals – a mental health Bill is on its way.
- The scope of treatment by community pharmacies will be expanded.
With the new plan able to release so many new initiatives – from robotic dispensing in pharmacies to prescribing access to housing and financial advice – it really does seem there is a very good chance that NHS and social care services will serve the country much better in ten years time.
Alan Conochie – October 2025