Healthcare delivery
accredited providers to support co-ordinated care.
One of the goals is to provide a single patient
record (SPR) by 2028. It is intended that the SPR will consolidate patient information by amalgamating the patient’s health information, test results and letters into one unified accessible place. It should be able to provide immediate access to up-to-date information regardless of where the patient is receiving treatment. Medical grade wearables will be standard
in preventative, chronic and post-acute NHS treatment by the end of the Plan. Wearables will monitor vital signs and biomarkers, which will feed data into the NHS App and the SPR. To ensure digital transformation is inclusive and equitable, the NHS will: l Provide wearables free of charge in areas of high deprivation or health need.
l Ensure the NHS App and digital tools are accessible including support for translation, screen readers and British Sign Language.
l Partner with libraries and community organisations to help people get set up on the NHS App.
l Recruit App Ambassadors to support uptake and usage in underserved communities.
Technology is expected to change the way that people interact and access services, and to take over many administrative tasks to free up staff time, so that they can focus on patient care. The immediate response from this author to the digitalisation plans is ‘how much money and time will need to be spent on staff training, let alone patients?’ The latter will find that many of them are excluded due to lack of knowledge of the App and how to use it. The NHS does not have a great record on provision of software to healthcare – remember the expensive mistake with the original electronic patient record? Let us hope that this is not going to be repeated. There will be some big tech companies rubbing their hands with glee, at present.
Moving health towards prevention and away from sickness The last of the three shifts is from sickness to prevention, which includes working with large food suppliers and major retailers to increase the healthiness of our food. There is an emphasis on enabling people with health problems to stay in work, a new screening programme for lung cancers and testing on ‘prevention accelerators’ to tackle the variation in uptake of CVD and diabetes interventions. Integrated Care Boards will be expected to provide population health improvement plans with local partners. There is also a scheme to test genomically all
newborns and population based polygenic risk scoring, among other diagnostic tools, which will enable early identification and intervention for individuals at high risk of developing common diseases. Instead of spotting a symptom and joining a long waiting list, neighbourhood care will increasingly happen before a disease happens, enabling a real shift to prevention.4
The Plan identifies five transformative
technologies (big bets) in areas of competitive advantage to personalise care, improve outcomes, increase productivity and boost economic growth. Bet 1 – is that by 2035, your health data will flow seamlessly and securely. The Plan commits to launch the recently announced Health Data Research Service, which should unlock the untapped potential of NHS dataset to share anonymised data for research.
Bet 2 - by 2035, the NHS will have AI as each health professional’s trusted assistant and will be seamlessly integrated into most clinical pathways with generative AI tools widely adopted.5
Bet 3 - The personalised health journey will begin at birth and will accelerate the adoption of new advances in genomics and predictive analytics.
Bet 4 - Wearables will be standard in specific health situations and all patients will have access to these technologies.
Bet 5 - Robots will deliver surgical care with unprecedented precision. The range of procedures will be expanded, and the number of robots will be adopted in line with NICE guidelines from 2026. National registries for robotic surgery data to scale successful trials of assistive robotics from 2029.
How can all this be achieved? The Plan is ambitious in its aims and focuses relentlessly on delivering value-based healthcare. However, it also shows that change needs to happen throughout the whole system
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www.clinicalservicesjournal.com I August 2025
nicholasjermy -
stock.adobe.com
Nick Beer -
stock.adobe.com
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