Neighbourhood health ‘can’t be line managed’

A government neighbourhood health lead has warned the service “can’t line manage organisations outside the NHS into change”, which will instead rely on “frontline involvement” organised in relatively small patches.

Sir John Oldham, a former GP who is chairing the government’s neighbourhood health implementation programme, launched a call three weeks ago for applications to join its first wave.

The “large-scale change programme” will be joined up with parallel national 10-Year Health Plan  delivery work, including developing two neighbourhood health provider contracts, and changing funding flows.

But Sir John told HSJ that successful implementation “requires the meaningful frontline involvement of partners at a neighbourhood level… You can’t line manage organisations outside the NHS into change, you have to engage and facilitate. Yet it is their contribution that will be needed [to achieve] the hard deliverables”. 

The senior adviser to health and social care secretary Wes Streeting also said the programme would not accept applications from multiple places working as one, because they would be too wide to properly engage local teams. “The connectivity between place and neighbourhood will be very important, which is why a single application from multiple places won’t be accepted,” he said. “The definition of a place is up to local people.

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Source: HSJ, 1 August 2025