Yesterday, the Prime Minister launched the Government’s 10 Year Health Plan.
Policy Exchange has been at the forefront of the debate on health and care reform in recent years and yesterday, more than twenty policy recommendations made by Policy Exchange’s Health and Social Care Unit – across eight different reports published in the past four years – were included in the 10 Year Health Plan. These recommendations range from proposals to restructure the NHS, reform primary care, improve the adoption of innovative technology and enabling more British students to work as doctors.
Some of these proposals include:
- Making major improvements to the NHS App to turn it into a ‘smart’ ‘front door’ to the NHS, so you can book appointments, view test results and records, seek out high-quality information and consult with healthcare professionals directly, building on our proposal to develop a service called ‘NHS Gateway’ in our report, At Your Service: A proposal to reform general practice and enable digital healthcare at scale (2022). In that report, Policy Exchange was also the first think tank to explore the idea of enabling UK-registered professionals working in other countries to provide remote services to NHS patients which also features in the 10 Year Plan.
- Giving patients greater choice over time and enabling them to ‘self-refer’ to a wider range of specialist services over time, including the ability to ‘self-book’ select diagnostic tests, something we recommended in A Portrait of Modern Britain: Health (2025).
- Reorientating the focus of NHS recruitment away from a dependency on international recruitment, towards UK-based talent, building on the recommendations made in Double Vision: A roadmap to double medical school places (2022) to double medical school places, with a focus on areas that are currently ‘under-doctored’ which was launched at Policy Exchange in December 2022 with a keynote speech from the now Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, Rt Hon Wes Streeting MP.
- Overhauling how patient feedback and complaints are managed, to create a simpler, more responsive system, drawing on our proposal to develop NHS Patient View, a unified patient feedback and complaints service in our report, Just About Managing: The Role of Effective Management and Leadership in Improving NHS Performance and Productivity (2024).
- Setting new standards and expectations for NHS managers, through a new performance framework, including clear competencies for managers at every level of seniority and an improved approach to appraisals – recommendations we made in Just About Managing: The Role of Effective Management and Leadership in Improving NHS Performance and Productivity (2024).
- Reducing bureaucracy and enabling health technologies to more swiftly scale across the NHS, through the creation of ‘innovator passports’ so that once an innovation has been assessed by one NHS organisation, others cannot insist on repeated assessments. The proposal builds on our call for the establishment of a ‘front door’ for innovators and for ‘national accreditation’ for proven, high quality products, something we first called for in At Your Service: A proposal to reform general practice and enable digital healthcare at scale (2022).
