Ensuring the success of neighbourhood health

The NHS Neighbourhood Rebuild Programme is an ambitious proposal to transform where and how patients access the healthcare they need through community-based infrastructure. Central to this shift from hospital care to community care is the creation of a network of 250 neighbourhood health centres. A plan to provide personalised and convenient healthcare in the local community is hard to argue against, so how can organisations now tasked to establish this new model ensure place-based care is a success? Sainaja Feroz, associate of architecture at Pick Everard, says the planning and design process will be the bridge between strategy and delivery. 

With promises from the government that 120 new Neighbourhood Health Centres (NHCs) will be operational by 2030, the NHS Neighbourhood Rebuild announcement could be viewed as a test of the reflexes. Going hand in hand with service and efficiency reforms, this 'new generation' of NHCs is said to be fundamental to cutting NHS waiting times and ending a postcode lottery of healthcare access.

But while the concepts of integrated teams and moving care closer to home are by no means original in NHS primary and secondary care circles, applying 'without walls' thinking to physical and environmental assets — in the time scales suggested — is, to some extent, new territory. We know it can be done — the pandemic taught us that. But did we learn enough to retain that agility within the systems and processes we apply day-to-day, during what has once again become normal circumstances?