COMMUNITY FACILITIES
Delivering healthcare closer to home
With the Government’s 10 Year Health Plan promising radical change to bolster the NHS for generations to come, designing for healthcare needs to reflect a new form of service delivery. Mark Dando, director of cost management at consultancy Pick Everard, explores how high street locations could be the key to unlocking convenience and ease of access for patients.
The neighbourhood health service, designed around you – that’s the vision outlined in Fit for the future: 10 Year Health Plan for England. As you might expect, there are some big promises in there, and making good on those pledges is going to hinge on having the infrastructure to support the exceptional service provided by our healthcare professionals. Putting patients first is more than a sympathetic bedside manner – it boils down to everything from how an environment puts a patient at ease to how well served a location is by public transport. As last year’s IHEEM Healthcare Estates conference focused on the role that architecture, engineering and estate management play in promoting ‘prevention rather than cure’, the case for revisiting the idea of health on the high street seems stronger than ever.
Anchoring healthcare Health on the High Street was first mentioned in an NHS Confederation report in 2020, with a concept of ‘reimaging the connection between the NHS and the high street’, and the role health could play in supporting economic and social recovery. More broadly, it was
proposed as a way for the NHS to get directly involved in high street policy, supporting communities through the reshaping of vacant high street units into integrated health centres, thereby revitalising footfall in town centres. This idea is not new, and had been explored in recent
years. However, the implementation has been gradual, mainly because of what happened with the COVID-19 pandemic. But what the Coronavirus experience did teach us all – patients, healthcare professionals and building services experts – was that healthcare services can be provided in diverse ways, and in different locations, that may have not really been considered before. Transforming community centres into vaccination hubs, using modular buildings as temporary hospitals, turning dormant sports halls, and leisure centres into testing clinics. The NHS response to the pandemic showed that bringing healthcare into the heart of the community could increase
Repurposing premises is widely seen as an effective and efficient way for the NHS to deliver more for communities, especially in smaller towns. Speed of delivery is essential.
In Brixton, an ageing retail unit was transformed into a modern clinical facility for the NHS Blood and Transplant service.
The blood donation environment was designed to be welcoming and encourage more donors.
January 2026 Health Estate Journal 69
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