The Department of Health and Social Care (DH) yesterday (September 9) revealed the locations of the first neighbourhood health services to be rolled out across England as part of its 10-year plan for the NHS.
It said that “43 places across the country” will “benefit from improved care closer to home” as it begins the first wave of the rollout. Find out the full list of locations below.
Read more: DH to roll out 42 neighbourhood health hubs from September
The new hubs will target areas “with the highest deprivation” and will initially focus on long-term conditions like “diabetes, arthritis, angina, high blood pressure, MS or epilepsy”, it added.
The initial rollout is “backed by £10 million” and began yesterday with “the ambition to scale up more services over the course of the next year”, the DH said.
“GP cornerstone”
The DH said that the 43 chosen areas will be “allocated a programme lead” tasked with working with “existing local services” to create a new neighbourhood health service.
The leads will use “general practice as the cornerstone” in drawing together a “neighbourhood health team” made up of a range of professions including pharmacists, community nurses, hospital doctors, social care workers, dentists and paramedics, it added.
The DH also said that “GP leaders will be pivotal in shaping and delivering” the new health hubs and “will be supported to deliver” them with two new “voluntary neighbourhood health contracts” from 2026.
Read more: Timeline: The NHS 10-year plan for pharmacies at a glance
Under the contracts, GPs can choose to be part of either a single-neighbourhood provider that “will deliver enhanced services for around 50,000 people” or a multi-neighbourhood provider serving “around 250,000 people”, the government added.
But it remains unclear exactly what role pharmacists will play in the new hubs.
The health secretary previously suggested that Boots could be called upon to work with the new neighbourhood health centres to help deliver “a greater range of services” as part of the reforms.
“Pivotal moment”
Health secretary Wes Streeting said that the neighbourhood health services “fundamentally reimagine how the NHS works” and will help to “tackle this nation’s shameful health inequalities”.
And NHS Providers chief executive Daniel Elkeles said that the rollout is “a pivotal moment” that sees the NHS “nationally embrace what the NHS locally has already started”.
Read more: Boots tipped to ‘work with’ neighbourhood health hubs
“With the right funding, the NHS and local partners will extend neighbourhood services even further, shifting care from hospitals to the community to deliver an NHS fit for the future,” he added.
It comes after the DH revealed in July that it had taken the “first steps” to roll out its flagship neighbourhood health services across the country.
It said at the time that the first 42 sites would “immediately start rolling out their neighbourhood health programmes” from this month, with “clear guidance, support and metrics to report on regularly”.
Read more: DH to launch pharmacist-staffed ‘neighbourhood health services’
The new health hubs were announced as part of the government’s 10-year plan for the NHS in England and will see services such as diagnostics, mental health, post-op, rehab and nursing housed under one roof, staffed by “pioneering teams” including pharmacists.
It said that the centres “will eventually be open 12 hours a day, six days a week within local communities” and will offer services like debt advice, employment support and stop smoking or weight management as well as bringing “historically hospital-based services into the community”.
The government set out that it aims to have “250 to 300” neighbourhood health centres open “by the end” of the 10-year plan in 2035 and for 40 to 50 centres to open “over the course of this parliament”.
Full list of locations
The 43 neighbourhood health hub sites announced by the DH are:
- South and West Hertfordshire (Decorum and Hertsmere)
- North East Essex
- Ipswich and East Suffolk
- Barking and Dagenham
- Hillingdon
- Lambeth and Southwark
- Croydon
- Walsall
- Coventry
- Shropshire
- Leicestershire (West)
- Nottingham City
- North East Lincolnshire
- Stockton
- Rotherham
- Bradford and Craven (Bradford South, Keighley and Airedale)
- Sefton
- Rochdale
- Blackburn and Darwen
- East Berkshire and Slough
- Portsmouth
- East Kent
- East Surrey (Surrey Downs)
- Bristol (South Bristol)
- Cornwall and The Isles Of Scilly
- Dorset Place (Weymouth)
- West Essex
- West Suffolk
- Kensington, Chelsea and Westminster
- East Birmingham
- Solihull
- Herefordshire
- Sunderland
- Doncaster
- Wakefield
- Leeds (Hatch, South, East)
- St Helens
- Stockport
- Buckinghamshire (North, High Wycombe, Marlow Beaconsfield)
- East Sussex (Hastings and Rother)
- Woodspring
- Morecambe Bay
- Fenland, Peterborough and East, Peterborough
