Executive summary

A central pillar of the 10-year health plan is the move toward a Neighbourhood Health Service. Neighbourhood working is a model which sees local communities and statutory services take a collaborative approach, bringing together local health, social care, and community services to support people's health and wellbeing and improve care co-ordination at a local level. 

The shift to neighbourhood working is enabled by digital transformation and technologies. For NHS trust boards, this will require strategic board-level oversight and investment in platforms which help bring people and data together. 

Successfully enabling neighbourhood teams will require trust boards to address several key digital and data challenges. Neighbourhood teams cannot function effectively without a complete longitudinal patient view spanning primary, secondary, social, and third-sector care. Boards must prioritise and invest in robust shared care records and legally sound data-sharing agreements to mitigate the risk of fragmented data, which at best is a source of inefficiency, but at its worst can risk safety and good outcomes.

To be strategically effective, trusts must ensure their analytics capabilities move beyond historical performance monitoring, to proactively enable risk stratification and population segmentation at a local level. This evidence base is essential for allocating resources, measuring the effectiveness of prevention, and tackling health inequalities. 

These types of initiatives are above all about different ways of working. First and foremost, this requires extremely effective partnership working that boards need to spearhead. Boards should also support the transition of digital funding from short-term project budgets to long-term forms of funding to enable the sustainability of community partnerships and the continuous evolution of digital and data platforms. 

Boards should recognise that digital capability is not an operational overhead but the strategic enabler of neighbourhood working and providing care closer to home, requiring a change in culture, process, operating models and technologies.