Wates Sets Out Plan for 250 NHS Neighbourhood Health Centres

A defining aim of the NHS’ 10 Year Health Plan, published by the UK Government in 2025, is to shift care delivery primarily from hospitals and into patients' homes and neighbourhoods.

Underpinned by the principle of delivering care as “locally as it can”, the plan to establish 250 neighbourhood health centres (NHCs) across England by 2035 will be central to delivering this radical shift.

Outlining how this aim could be achieved in practice, UK construction firm Wates Group, with support from NHS England, has published a white paper exploring how the network of NHCs could be delivered across England.

Entitled ‘Partnerships for progress: delivering a new generation of neighbourhood healthcare infrastructure’, the paper identifies the practical conditions needed to deliver the initiative through a credible national delivery model.

“The ambition to develop a new generation of neighbourhood health centres represents one of the most significant opportunities to transform the NHS estate and improve community healthcare in a generation”, says Simon Corben, Director and Head of Profession, NHS Estates at NHS England. 

“Delivering this vision will require strong partnerships across the public and private sectors, bringing together investment, expertise and innovation to support better outcomes for patients.”

The NHS estate currently covers an estimated 27 million square metres and costs over £13bn (US$17.2bn) per year to run. 

Practical steps for delivery

Wates and NHS England are calling for a new public-private partnership model to attract investment into healthcare infrastructure, drawing on lessons from previous approaches.

The paper also recommends a clear, prioritised pipeline of projects and emphasises the need to embed social value and patient outcomes into every stage of project design and delivery.

Wates CEO Eoghan O’Lionard, speaking to Healthcare Digital, shared insight into how the company would approach NHC delivery as ambition evolves into action.

According to Eoghan, avoiding a fragmented approach will be key to delivering the proposed 250 NHCs effectively.

“If every neighbourhood health centre is approached as a standalone project”, Eoghan explains, “with its own procurement process and delivery model, we risk building unnecessary cost and complexity into the programme from the outset.”

Instead, he urges NHC delivery to “take a much more programmatic approach.”

This approach involves grouping centres geographically, standardising components and design principles and “crucially, contractors need to be involved while those early decisions are still being made, before the designs are largely fixed and the opportunity to improve buildability, cost and timescales has narrowed.”

These considerations are not designed to compromise the “needs of individual communities,” explains Eoghan. “It means creating a more consistent framework for delivery so that time and resource can be focused where local variation genuinely adds value.”

Meeting community needs

In line with this point, Eoghan stresses that standardisation does not equate to uniformity. In its white paper, Wates advocates that NHC project delivery embrace flexible design principles and accommodate the unique needs of each community.

“Moving more care into communities means creating places that can bring different services together and adapt as local healthcare needs change, so flexibility has to be considered from the earliest stages of design,” says Eoghan.

“There is sometimes an assumption that standardisation means creating identical buildings everywhere, but that isn’t what we are advocating. We can establish common approaches to elements that are repeated across the programme, while retaining the flexibility to respond to the services and communities each centre will support.”

Engineering flexibility into building design to accommodate individual community health needs will allow the proposed NHCs to become more than just health centres.

Striking the balance between standardisation and flexibility will give England’s NHCs “an opportunity to be more than simply new healthcare buildings. If we get the planning and design right, they can become part of the infrastructure of a community, making services easier to access and supporting the wider shift towards prevention and care closer to home.”

Looking ahead

As Wates and NHS England continue to collaborate on a practical model of NHC delivery, the company encourages the UK Government to drive two core delivery outcomes forward:

1. Establish a clear national delivery framework for NHCs.
2. Create a prioritised pipeline of NHC projects batched by geography.

With the Government pledging to open the first 120 NHCs by 2030, efforts to translate this ambition into a practical delivery programme are likely to gather pace in the coming years.