Care Closer to Home Conference 2026

Watch Lord Victor Adebowale's opening speech.

The breakfast session was delivered in partnership with Community Health Partnerships, focussing on practical estates solutions and making the most of existing infrastructure to deliver the neighbourhood health agenda. The session expands on the findings of our recent report: Accelerating estate solutions for neighbourhood health centre delivery.

Key findings:

• To accelerate delivery of neighbourhood health, the government has announced 250 neighbourhood health centres (NHCs) through the NHS Neighbourhood Rebuild Programme, with 120 operational by 2030. The quickest way to deliver on the NHCs promise is by maximising use of the existing estate, in both healthcare and partnership buildings through strategic commissioning and co-location.
• Partnership working is essential to delivering neighbourhood health centres but cross-sector collaborations can become complex without a dedicated convenor and clear shared purpose. The convenor role can be delivered by an NHS or external body.
• Key partners including local authorities and the voluntary sector are vital to designing wrap around care solutions, and should be involved in designing neighbourhood health infrastructure.
• Co-location is not a silver bullet for integration, but the starting point for redesigning care pathways and developing new ways of working together to deliver holistic care. Successful co-location requires strong leadership and dissolution of siloed approaches.
• Redeveloping estates can be a financial burden on systems and providers, especially where an individual provider holds all the risk. Utilising Local Improvement Finance Trust (LIFT) estates reduces the costs and risk to the NHS. In areas where there is a lack of LIFT assets, current funding flows limit system's ability to facilitate change. Funding redesign to allow systems to pool budgets and retain capital from selling underutilised estates would incentivise a new approach to estates.

Speakers: 

• Chair: Ruth Rankine, Director, Primary and Community Care and Neighbourhood Health, The NHS Alliance
• James Bawn, Strategic Business Development Director, Community Health Partnerships
• Ama Goulden, South East Regional Programme Manager, One Public Estate - Local Government Association
• Sarah Mcilwaine, Director of Primary Care, North Central London ICB
• Dr Jonathan Levy, Clinical Director Kentish Town South PCN

The NHS Alliance has been working with neighbourhood teams across the South East to rethink how integrated care is delivered — starting with what matters most to people and communities. The South East Neighbourhood Health Accelerator Programme is made up of different perspectives from across local government, primary care, integrated care systems, community and Voluntary community and social enterprise organisations (VCSE).

Key reflections from the panel include:

• One way the programme has benefited participants is through challenging teams to meet people where they are. This is physically, socially, emotionally and systemically. Teams begin with lived experience, local insights and a shared understanding of inequalities.
• Its 'learning by doing' which is helping to generate solutions in neighbourhoods. Bringing together communities, clinicians, primary care networks, councils, social care, NHS partners and the VCSE gives local areas real agency to act on their priorities, empowering neighbourhoods to design interventions that genuinely work for their Place.
• Neighbourhood health isn’t about reorganising services, it’s about systemic thinking which requires co-production and creativity, looking beyond single services or issues and rooted in designing services around the person. There are examples across the country where more joined-up, timely and human care is being delivered within neighbourhoods at pace.

Additional resources:

• A LinkedIn blog by Louise Wheeler, head of leadership and organisational development and assistant director, NHS Confederation, with reflections on the conference session.

Speakers:

• Chair: Louise Wheeler, Head of Leadership Development and Assistant Director, NHS Confederation
• Helen Gillivan, Director of Commissioning Adult Social Care, Kent County Council
• Kamal Bahia, Integrated Neighbourhoods Development – Regional PCN Lead, NHS England - South East Region
• Amy Warman, PCN Development Manager and Integrated Neighbourhood Team Management Lead, Alliance for Better Care
• Rachel Jevons, Lead for Public Mental Health and Crawley PH Locality Lead, West Sussex County Council
• Dr Mayur Vibhuti, Chief Clinical Information Officer, Kent and Medway ICB
• Aeilish Geldenhuys, Strategic Head of Public Health, Medway Council
• Dr Pro Mallik, Senior GP Partner and Frailty Specialist GP and Clinical Director, Medway Central PCN

Optum hosted a breakout session which examined how population health management (PHM) insights had been turned into real operational change to support neighbourhood‑based primary care and care closer to home.

We heard about early‑stage system‑wide scaling of PHM, focusing on how large systems supported neighbourhoods to select their own priority cohorts while maintaining overall coherence. The challenges of rapid rollout, the limits of enthusiasm without clear commissioning and payment alignment, and the importance of embedding PHM cycles into decision‑making rather than treating them as one‑off analytical exercises. This was contrasted with a system with a more mature implementation, outlining how PHM had been embedded as business as usual over several years. The practical use of linked health, social care and mental health data to demonstrate impact, build robust business cases for investment, and scale successful PCN‑led pilots into county‑wide services were all highlighted.

Throughout the session, facilitated reflection drew out common themes across both case studies, including the need to move from data science to data storytelling, make insights accessible to frontline teams, and manage cultural change alongside technical capability. Discussion also addressed how systems navigated the transition from pilots to sustainable services, balanced local autonomy with strategic consistency, and secured longer‑term funding.

The session concluded with audience Q&A, reinforcing transferable lessons on cohort selection, impact measurement and sustainability that were relevant to systems at different stages of PHM maturity.

Speakers:

• Chair: Dr Chris Nortcliff, Chief Clinical Information Officer and GP Digital Lead, Greater Manchester Primary Care Provider Board
• Alexis Bradshaw, Regional Director for Midlands, Optum
• Matt Jones, Deputy Director of Population Health Management and Prevention, North East London ICB
• Bethan George, Regional Director for London and East of England, Optum 

Additional resources:

• Access the slides

Specsavers hosted this breakout session, bringing together leaders from primary care to challenge current system design and make the case for a truly integrated, community based model of care.

Opening the session, Stephen McAndrew challenged the persistent mindset that overlooks optometry, pharmacy and dentistry in primary care commissioning and strategy discussions:

‘Primary care is not just GPs. Too often we hear, ‘we just forgot you.’ Yet pharmacy, optometry and dentistry are frequently the most accessible, most effective community-based parts of the health system.’

McAndrew emphasised lessons from NHS Scotland, where optometry and pharmacy routinely complete patient journeys without involving GP appointments: ‘Scotland shows what’s possible. Patients receive safe, effective care closer to home from

professionals who already have the skills and infrastructure. We don’t need new buildings or diagnostic centres — we need to use what already exists.’

Speakers urged deliberate, not accidental, integration and emphasised that the major barriers to progress are mindset and structural design, not professional capability.

The panel closed with a clear series of practical challenges for system leaders:

• Ask, ‘Who is missing?’ from every planning, commissioning or budget meeting.
• Focus on mindset and connectivity, not new buildings or additional layers of governance.
• Challenge siloed thinking, particularly separate budgets for primary, urgent and elective care.
• Learn from places where integration already works, rather than reinventing models from scratch.

Speakers:

• Chair: Dr Duncan Gooch, Chair - Primary Care Network, The NHS Alliance and GP and PCN Clinical Director, Erewash Health Partnership
• Stephen McAndrew, Director of NHS Services, Specsavers
• Dharmesh Patel, Chief Executive, Primary Eyecare Services
• Amit Patel, Chief Executive, Community Pharmacy South West London

Neighbourhood working is no longer an abstract ambition - it's a delivery expectation. For many leaders, the challenge today isn't whether neighbourhoods are the right model, but how to make them function in the reality of stretched services, rising demand and organisational boundaries.

We are seeing neighbourhoods across the country at very different stages. Some are still largely conceptual. Others have reached a point where teams genuinely work together around the same residents.

What’s striking is that the difference rarely comes down to structure alone.

In this breakout session hosted by Accurx, panelists discussed what actually changes when neighbourhoods become real - for residents, for staff, and for leaders - and the digital and operational choices that either accelerate or slow that transition.

The panel explored:

• The moment neighbourhood working shifts from theory to practice
• The hardest changes required to move from planning to delivery
• Digital friction points that prevent teams from operating as one
• The practical enablers that support coordination across services
• What “working as one team” actually looks like in daily behaviours
• How complexity can be designed out of neighbourhood models

Speakers:

• Chair: Dr Satya Raghuvanshi, VP of Clinical, Accurx
• Dr Dan Bunstone, Clinical Director, Warrington Innovation PCN
• Dr Mayur Vibhuti, Chief Clinical Information Officer for NHS Kent & Medway ICB
• Dr Penelope Blackwell, Chair and Clinical Director for Neighbourhood Health and Care, Derby and Derbyshire ICB

The government's 10 Year Health Plan put the establishment of a neighbourhood health service front and centre of its reform agenda. With all eyes now focused on implementation, this session will draw on learnings from best practice across the country (including the National Neighbourhood Health Implementation Programme) - showcasing how providers, systems and wider partners, including local government have begun to create the conditions to deliver a new model of care for patients and communities.

Panellists shared their own personal experiences and case studies to facilitate peer-to-peer challenge and learnings.

Watch a recording of the panel session.

Speakers:

• Chair: Ruth Rankine, Director, Primary and Community Care and Neighbourhood Health, The NHS Alliance
• Dr Claire Fuller. National Medical Director, NHS England
• Dr Minal Bakhai MBE, Director of Primary Care and Community Transformation and National Lead for the Neighbourhood Health Implementation Programme, NHS England
• Jacob Lant, Chief Executive, National Voices
• Mike Barker, Deputy Chief Executive, Oldham Council
• Claire Kennedy, Joint Chief Executive, PPL