What the 10 Year Health Plan means for care home operators
The government announced its ambition to “bring health services to people’s doorsteps” in its new 10 Year Health Plan, which was released earlier this month.
The Prime Minister hailed it as one of the most seismic shifts in the history of the health service. But what does the plan tell us about the opportunities for the UK’s residential care, assisted living, specialist education and nursery care operators?
What does the government’s 10 Year Health Plan propose?
The language in the plan is stark, saying the NHS must “reform or die”:
“The NHS now stands at an existential brink. Demographic change and population ageing are set to heap yet more demand on an already stretched health service,” the report says.
It aims to reinvent the NHS through three “radical” shifts:
- “Hospital to community”
- “Analogue to digital”
- “Sickness to prevention”
What do healthcare operators need to know about the plan?
1. Highlighting important demographic changes
The government’s plan puts the UK’s changing demographics front and centre. These are important changes – and are driving the demand for investment in healthcare facilities.
The number of people aged over 85 in England is set to more than double by 2050, according to The King’s Fund. The demand for care will be exacerbated by disability among working-age adults, which increased from 16% in 2012-13 to 23% in 2022-23, according to government data.
2. Focusing on care in the community
Lord Darzi published an investigation into the NHS in September 2024, which provided the starting point for the plan.
“Too many people end up in hospital, because too little is spent in the community,” Darzi said in his letter to the Secretary of State. “The dire state of social care means 13% of NHS beds are occupied by people waiting for social care support or care in more appropriate settings.”
He added that since at least 2006, successive governments have promised to shift care away from hospitals and into the community, but in practice the opposite has happened.
The government now wants to deliver more care in the community by:
- Increasing the share of investment that’s made in out-of-hospital care
- Training thousands more GPs and encouraging them to become neighbourhood providers
- Creating a Neighbourhood Health Centre (NHC) in every community
Finally, it notes that the NHS will “deliver more urgent care in the community, in people’s homes or through NHCs, to end hospital outpatients as we know it by 2035”.
3. Devolving NHS leadership
The reforms aim to “push power out to places, providers and patients”, continuing the focus on community-led care. It plans to do this by:
- Combining NHS England, the headquarters of the NHS, with the Department of Health and Social Care, reducing central headcount by 50%
- Making Integrated Care Boards the strategic commissioners of local healthcare services
- Giving NHS Foundation Trusts (FT) the ability to retain surpluses and reinvest them, and to borrow for capital investment
- Creating a new opportunity for “the very best” NHS FTs to hold the whole health budget for a defined local population as an integrated health organisation
- Continuing to make use of private sector capacity to treat NHS patients where it is available
What does the 10 Year Health Plan mean for healthcare operators?
The 10 Year Health Plan’s ambition to move care from hospitals to the community supports operators’ beliefs and business models. The plan to increase capacity in the community will likely increase referral numbers too.
The government stresses the need to invest across the country, highlighting the disparities between health outcomes.
The UK needs significant investment in care home beds over the next decade. However, activity is currently focused on London and Southern England, with over half of the new homes expected to be built there in the next three years, according to Savills.
It will be interesting to see how the government addresses this imbalance and the degree to which additional spending in the community creates opportunities for UK care home operators.
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