Overview

First published in July 2025, ‘Fit for the Future: The 10 Year Health Plan for England’ was presented to Parliament by the then Health Secretary, Wes Streeting, promising to:

  • Reduce health inequalities.
  • Harness advances in Science & Technology, particularly in AI to develop new treatments.
  • Provide more care in the community, reducing pressures on hospitals and giving patients easier access to local services.
  • Make the NHS App the digital front door to your healthcare.
  • Introduce new measures to improve the health of our population, particularly focusing on smoking & vaping in young children, the obesity crisis, alcohol consumption, mental health and vaccinations.

The 10 Year Health Plan for England focuses on 3 main headlines it aims to achieve:

  1. Hospital to Community
  2. Sickness to Prevention
  3. Analogue to Digital

In this article, we are focussing on the third headline, ‘Analogue to Digital’, and what it means for patients and what’s been achieved so far.

Current landscape

To the general public, it is often mistakenly thought that the NHS is one large entity across the country, having IT systems that should easily be able to communicate with one another and services that are aligned in the care that they provide. The reality is quite different. NHS organisations up and down the country are managed independently of one another, and typically grouped by region or metropolitan area to be overseen by larger entities called Integrated Care Boards. There are also separate NHS bodies governing England, Wales and Scotland. Individual NHS organisations have the mandate to decide which IT systems they introduce so long as they meet strict criteria surrounding security and Information Governance, but one thing they don’t have to do – communicate with other systems easily. The result of this can be quite frustrating to a patient if their care spans multiple organisations, and the scenario below explains why:

report_problem Problem Statement

Joe, after experiencing numbness in his legs visits his local Accident & Emergency Department. Following triage, the staff promptly send Joe for a CT scan where they discover a growth which they want to investigate further. He is discharged from the Accident & Emergency Department with medication, and is informed he will be later invited for an MRI scan to get a better picture of the growth they've found.


Some weeks later and now under the care of the Oncology department, Joe is recommended for Radiotherapy treatment to help relieve the symptoms he's experiencing. The NHS Trust who provide the Radiotherapy is different to his local hospital. When attending his appointment, Joe is told that before he can have the treatment he needs to go for another CT scan. Questioning why he needs to have another scan when his local hospital have already done one, the staff explain that this is because the previous images are not accessible by them.

The scenario above is a common example of the experience that patients receive when their care spans services across multiple organisations. Because the two Trusts involved in Joe’s care use systems which are unable to talk to one another, this resulted in a further CT scan needing to be carried out, time and resources wasted, and ultimately a poorer experience for Joe. The picture gets even more complicated for the patient if additional organisations are involved. The NHS recognises this and has announced the Single Patient Record (SPR) as the solution.

"We will take the NHS from global laggard to global leader in technology. It will be through digital technology that we push out power from the centre of the NHS - to clinicians and to citizens." - Fit for the Future: The 10 Year Health Plan for England

Single Patient Record

Based on the strict security and Information Governance principles that already underpin systems used in NHS organisations, the Single Patient Record will:

  • give people a single trusted record of their health bringing together medical history, test results, treatments, and prescriptions in one place. The NHS App will be fundamental to this goal by acting as a digital front door to everything related to their healthcare.
  • provide healthcare professionals with a complete, reliable view of each patient which will reduce duplication, close gaps in information and put an end to experiences such as Joe’s that we read earlier.
  • empower patients: giving them control over who has access to their data and provides clear audit history.
  • improve the user experience: designed collaboratively by healthcare professionals and the public, providing a complete and user-friendly experience to patients.

The NHS is already well underway in delivering a service fit for the future. Patients are seeing real-life improvements to how they interact with their healthcare record, and thanks to the Patient Care Aggregator via the Wayfinder project, patients are now able to benefit even further by viewing and managing their appointments directly within the NHS App.

Patient Portal

Change isn’t just happening at a national level, either. The rise of the Patient Portal, a system provided by local NHS organisations that gives patients a view of their healthcare record and digital services available, compliments the functionality already available within the NHS App. Features such as appointment management, documents & questionnaires and Patient Initiated Follow-Up (PIFU) are typically available in these systems, giving NHS organisations the flexibility to introduce their own styling which may differ to the design found in the NHS App. The caveat of this however, is that you can introduce a mixed experience for patients depending on their local Trust, which is largely influenced by technical experience from in-house staff, or the commercial supplier providing the system.

Closing remarks

What we are seeing within the NHS is a fundamental shift in mindset which has largely been triggered by increasing demand and rigorous financial targets that ICBs and local NHS organisations are expected to meet. It is widely accepted that the NHS cannot continue with the status-quo approach of injecting more money without reform. Fortunately, the changes implemented so far are just the start of what the NHS in England aims to achieve in its ’10 Year Health Plan’ for digital transformation.

The advancements we have seen in such a short space of time is testament to what can be achieved within the NHS when there is a clear plan which is robust, well thought through, and has had engagement from health professionals and the general public. Implementing this plan is made possible by the help and guidance of industry experts spanning many areas of IT, Cyber Security and Information Governance, and with the rise of AI in healthcare we believe that the future for the NHS is both exciting and has the potential to truly revolutionise the experience patients receive.