Ten Year Health Plan – first thoughts

Digital Transformation Thought Leadership

July 3, 2025Emma Doyle0 Comments

Ten Year Health Plan – first thoughts

The ten year plan is finally here. It’s been widely leaked/trailed, but now we can see it in glorious, and incredibly lengthy, technicolour. And without a delivery plan.

Like everyone else we are still digesting it, but we have assembled some early reflections.

Money money money

A boost for funding for tech was announced in the Spending Review a few weeks ago. £10bn for tech over the next three years amounts to around a welcome 50% increase in funding. With big ambitions touted for the NHS App, EPRs everywhere (including money for those trusts that happen to not be acutes) the Federated Data Platform and Single Patient Record, how much wiggle room is there really for some of the other technologies, especially those that make the biggest difference to nurses.

Tech that improves the lives of nurses

Around 58% of nurses’ time is spent on tasks other than direct patient care, and we know that a proportion of those tasks lend themselves to being replaced by or augmented by tech. This includes documentation, medicines administration, task delegation, finding equipment etc. It is great to see this recognised in the plan, with this nugget:

“make AI every nurse’s and doctor’s trusted assistant – saving them time and supporting them in decision making”.

As ever, the devil will be in the detail, and funding levels are still unknown, but if we can make sure that nurses voices are heard in the development and selection of these products, then this could be good. There is also more to do to make sure these technologies really work for nurses and the interactions they have with patients. For example, large language models and ambient voice technology have been evaluated for use by doctors, but not so much for nurses. It will be important to address this in order to make them as effective for nurses as possible.

Shifting care from hospital to the community

While the shift to community through neighbourhead heath is set out in some depth, it is very hard to see how it can be achieved without sorting out the challenges highlighted in the digital technology survey by the Queen’s Institute for Community Nursing (I hope they don’t mind us screen-grabbing this segment, click the picture to go to their website).

To be fair to the Government and NHS England, they have said that they recognise the need to invest in non-acute settings, but making sure that nurses have decent devices, decent connectivity and decent software needs investment, and we don’t yet know how much cash is available and of that, how much will be directed towards the needs of nurses.

Nurse training and education

We were really excited to see the commitment to “overhaul education and training curricula with the aim of future-proofing the NHS workforce” in the next three years. We have lots of thoughts on this, and the things we think should be included. In fact we sent them into the Ten Year Plan consultation platform, you can see what we said here. The short version of our submission is that standards, training, curricula and regulation should all be updated to better include digital literacy, data science, AI, genomics, research and innovation

We’ll share more of our thoughts as we get further into the detail.