Develop Consulting’s Response to the 10-Year Health Plan for England

Develop Consulting welcomes the ambition and breadth of the government’s 10-Year Health Plan for England. The vision laid out – reforming the NHS from a hospital-centric, analogue, reactive system to one that is community-led, digital-first, and prevention-focused is both necessary and compelling, whilst representing the needs of patients and families across England.

As with any good strategy or vision the devil is in the detail, while the document sets out a comprehensive roadmap for change, we must be clear: writing the plan is the easy part – enabling, resourcing and investing in delivering it is the hard part.

In our extensive experience working across NHS for 20+ years and with trusts, primary care, community, commissioners and with central teams, we know that People and Process will be the two critical pillars underpinning successful implementation. Without rigorous attention to these, even the most well-intentioned strategies can falter.

People: the true lever for transformation

The plan rightly acknowledges the need for a reimagined NHS workforce – smaller in size, but more skilled, more digitally enabled, and more empowered. Yet cultural change cannot be mandated from the centre. Shifting mindsets, behaviours and working practices across such a vast system will require sustained investment in leadership, coaching, and frontline engagement. Staff must be brought into the reform journey not as passive recipients of new models, but as co-creators of them, embracing the local population knowledge and experience for new models of care and shifts to care closer to home and prevention.

Plans to integrate AI, streamline bureaucracy, and enable more flexible working must be supported with clear communication, upskilling, and embedded change management. It is not enough to announce a “digital front door” or “neighbourhood health teams” – staff need structured, real-time support to redesign their workflows, adopt new tools, automation & AI and work in new cross-functional teams. Change fails not for lack of vision or intent, but for lack of ownership and empowerment, with supportive leadership.

Process: the missing link between strategy and outcomes

Too often, transformation initiatives within healthcare are launched without robust planning, governance and delivery mechanisms. Process redesign – at national, regional and local level -must go hand-in-hand with structural reform. For example, the shift from hospital to community care requires more than new contracts and funding flows; it demands reengineering of referral pathways, digitising care coordination, and aligning incentives across providers. That can’t happen without frontline process or pathway redesign.

Even with pathway redesign the reform goals cannot be delivered without digital access, transparency, and personalised care are reliant on integrated systems and interoperable data platforms – but just as critically, they rely on reworked patient journeys, data governance processes, and performance measures that make real-time improvement possible.

We urge system leaders to treat process improvement not as a one-time event, but as an ongoing discipline. Lean thinking, systems engineering and daily management practices must be embedded at every level of the NHS if the benefits of this plan are to be realised in practice.

The scale of this reform is significant – and rightly so. But it will be in the execution, not the aspiration, that success is determined.

Develop Consulting stands ready to support NHS organisations not just in understanding the ‘what’ of this transformation, but in delivering the ‘how’ – through structured improvement, hands-on support, capability-building, and frontline-led change.

Because in the end, transformation doesn’t happen on paper. It happens on wards, in clinics, in neighbourhood teams – and it is People and Process that will get us there.

To sign up for our free webinar discussing the ten year plan and how to implement change while protecting patient outcomes, which takes place on Wednesday, 30th July 2025, visit this link.