Everything you need to know about the government’s new NHS 10-year plan

The NHS must transform in three distinct ways if it is to continue saving lives for years to come, Sir Keir Starmer has said.

This morning, the government has published its 10-Year Plan, setting out how exactly it aims to make the health service in England fit for the future.

The 168-page document was unveiled by the Prime Minister, Chancellor Rachel Reeves, and Health Secretary Wes Streeting at a Health & Wellbeing Centre in Stratford, east London.

Many governments have set out long-term strategies to fix the NHS, but Streeting said staff were still ‘crying out’ for fundamental changes.

Here’s what you need to know about the plans.

What do we know about Keir Starmer’s 10-year NHS plan?

This plan was first announced in September last year, after Lord Darzi published his scathing report into the current state of the health service in England.

Initially, the government said it would be coming in spring this year, but instead it’s taken until deep into the summer to pull it together.

As Darzi suggested in his report, the focus of the plan is on three key areas of change.

Analogue to digital

The first change is moving the NHS from a service that relies heavily on physical documents to one running on a much faster digital system.

One of the foundations of this approach will be the NHS app, which the government wants to turn into a ‘world-leading tool for patient access, empowerment and care planning’.

Under the plans, patients will be able to use the app to get medical advice, choose their preferred provider, manage medicines, book vaccines, upload health data and co-ordinate a relative’s care.

Streeting also wants to increase the use of tech such as AI scribes to ‘liberate staff from their current burden of bureaucracy and administration’.

Hospital to community

Another planned shift is from the current hospital-centric model of the NHS to one that places a heavier focus on care in local communities – what the government calls the ‘Neighbourhood Health Service’.

Over the next three to four years, the share of health spending that goes towards hospitals will fall while investment in out-of-hospital care will proportionally increase.

There’s a pledge to open a neighbourhood health centre, open at least 12 hours a day and 6 days a week, in every community in England – starting in the places where healthy life expectancy is lowest.

The system of hospital outpatients will end ‘as we know it’ by 2035, the plan says, as more urgent care is delivered in the community.

Sickness to prevention

The third change will be from a focus on healing the sick to stopping people from becoming sick in the first place.

That involves launching a ‘moonshot to end the obesity epidemic’, with plans for mandatory targets for the healthiness of sales in the food sector and scaling up the use of weight-loss jabs like Mounjaro.

Speaking to the Sun, Streeting said the jabs are ‘a route not just to lower weight, but lower taxes’, since people will become less reliant on the NHS as they lose weight.

This element of the plan also includes the ban on those currently aged under 17 from ever being legally able to buy cigarettes; new standards for alcohol labelling; and boosting uptake of HPV vaccinations.

The Department of Health said this goal would be achieved by ‘harnessing a huge cross-societal energy on prevention’.

Where will the money come from for it?

This morning, Keir Starmer praised Rachel Reeves – making her first public appearance since crying at PMQs yesterday – for her work preparing the ground for the transformation.

He said: ‘It’s all down to the foundation we laid this year, all down to the path of renewal that we chose, the decisions made by the Chancellor, by Rachel Reeves, which mean we can invest record amounts in the NHS.’

But the Chancellor faces extreme pressure to find savings, and the large amount of funding needed for such profound change in the health service could prove a challenge.

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