NHS England published its annual Priorities and Operational Guidance for 25/26
The main implications for primary care are:
Improve patient access to general practice
Improve patient experience – measure via the Office of National Statistics Health Insights survey
Improve access to urgent dental care by commissioning 700,000 additional urgent dental appointments
Development of neighbourhood health models
Integrated care boards (ICBs) to reduce demand through developing neighbourhood health models, address inequalities, develop secondary prevention and support digital solutions.
By June 2025 ICBs should have action plans in place to improve contract oversight, commissioning and transformation for general practice and tackle unwarranted variation. They should continue to support the delivery of modern general practice and target support to practices based on their ability to provide access and a good overall experience for patients.
ICBs should prioritise prevention and proactive care as part of population health management through the GP contract, including increasing focus on preventing cardiovascular events by targeting high blood pressure and lipid control.
All GP practices should enable all core NHS App capabilities including health record access, online consults, appointment management, prescription management, online registration, and patient messaging.
Inequalities should be addressed and a shift made towards prevention measures, reducing inequalities in line with CORE20PLUS5 approach and increase the percentage of patients with hypertension treated according to the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) guidance. The percentage of patients with cardiovascular disease, who have their cholesterol levels managed in accordance with NICE guidance should also be increased.
At the same time as publishing the planning guidance several other documents were published – of note being the guidance on Neighbourhood Health. This reiterates the need to improve timely access to general practice and to consider best use of all neighbourhood buildings, in line with ICB led estate strategy work.
The core components of neighbourhoods were outlined:
Population health management
Modern general practice model
Standardising community health services
Neighbourhood multidisciplinary teams
Integrated intermediate care with home first approach
Urgent neighbourhood services
The foundations for neighbourhood health requires resilient sustainable primary care services, robust estate plans and the ability to support local leaders to work together and with local people to plan services from the perspective of service users, develop care in community settings and use the hospital only when its needed.