Personalised health – a key ambition within the 10 Year NHS plan

14 July 2025 to 25 July 2025 is PHG Foundation’s personalised health fortnight. Follow and share the campaign on LinkedIn

The 10 Year NHS Plan, published in early July 2025 offers a blueprint for the Labour government’s vision for health services in England over the next 10 years. What does it mean for personalised health? Well the short answer is plenty. It is a plan that relies on innovation and technology to solve many of the current health services problems, while seeking to improve patient empowerment and overall accountability.

Conceptually the plan uses three shifts to set out its ambitions around personalised health:

Shift from hospital to community, seeks to rebalance health services out of hospital settings by developing neighbourhood health services. This concept isn’t new, having been proposed by Lord Darzi as early as 2007 and reiterated in his State of the NHS 2024 report. The 200 neighbourhood services will aim to reduce demand on hospitals by offering diagnostics, post operative care and rehabilitation, plus prevention, integration with pharmacy and a new genomic population health service. The rationale is that by embedding genomics, these services will be able to offer behaviour change or different approaches to care at an earlier stage. 

Shift from analogue to digital in terms of health data, focuses on two key concepts: using the NHS app as the digital front door, and implementing AI to increase productivity. Much of the focus is on empowering patients to understand and manage their health needs. 

Shift from sickness to prevention, in part by addressing various risk factors such as smoking, obesity and air quality. The new genomics population health service which will combine genomics, new diagnostics and predictive analytics with AI and represents a big step in broadening the role and reach of genomics. It will, informed by the Generation Study, implement universal newborn screening and population based polygenic risk scoring alongside other emerging diagnostics. Genomic insights will be integrated into cardiovascular disease prevention through a trial with Our Future Health implementing integrated risk scores, with potential to roll out to other disease areas. There is acknowledgement of the importance of ethical considerations and that patient choice will be paramount. 

The central principle underpinning the three shifts is that care should happen as locally as it can: digital by default, in a home where possible, in a neighbourhood health service when needed, in a hospital if necessary. 

What does this mean for personalised health?

PHG Foundation’s mission is to make science work for health – so the strong focus on innovation and technology to address many of the current challenges, is welcome. 

Following our sector webinar to discuss ideas, our response to the 10 Year Plan consultation highlighted the potential for genomics and other innovations to improve health outcomes. Genomics is a powerful tool; it has enabled diagnosis of rare congenital diseases, identified specific types of cancer and via pharmacogenomics will start to ensure that drugs are increasingly only offered to those people who will benefit from them. However we know from 25 years working in the field that genomics on its own is not the answer to everything. Most health conditions are driven by the complex interplay between genomics, social and environmental factors. We need to utilise genomics when it is helpful but not overplay its power and tread carefully to maintain public confidence.

Overall there is an explicit focus on personalised health and the role of technologies, like genomics, to better predict and treat health conditions. Its potential relies on successful research studies – whether the Generation Study for newborns, the adult screening study or testing stratified risk scores via Our Future Health. There appears to be an underlying assumption that these studies will have positive findings and that the benefits will outweigh any risks or issues. It is good to see that the 10 Year Plan acknowledged the further work that is needed to ensure that public acceptability and the ethical implications of greater use of genomics are fully considered.

If genomics is part of many answers, it is vital that services, such as the new genomic population health service, integrate into wider health and prevention systems and clinical pathways. The use of genomics cannot be an afterthought in the planning and development of neighbourhood health services. Given the neighbourhood health services will be digitally enabled from conception, the specific data needs of genomics need to be considered from the start of planning and development of these services.

What next?

The 10 Year Plan is ambitious and has plenty to like, but it will need a delivery plan to articulate how the aims will actually be implemented. There is a risk that many will read the plan thinking these ideas aren’t new, they just haven’t ever successfully been implemented. More detail is needed such as: what are the information sharing implications or how will patients access a digital service if they don’t have a digital device? Furthermore the detail is needed to set out milestones, financial flows and the staging of implementation to reassure the sector that the foundations (whether evidence, infrastructure, skills or workforce capacity) are actually in place.

We await the next step of implementation to understanding timings, resources and the interplay between ideas. There is a huge opportunity for those advocating personalised health, and what we want to ensure is that it is set up to succeed. Both in terms of the way that services are planned and implemented, and in terms of the expectations around the impact of personalised health.

At PHG Foundation we’ll be building on our existing thinking in this space to consider the broader implications of the proposals. We will also be working with key stakeholders to develop the evidence and set out what will be needed to ensure personalised health can be successfully realised as part of the 10 Year Plan for the NHS.

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