The NHS 10 Year Health Plan and why 2026 could be a turning point for people in the NHS
There is a quiet sense right now that 2026 might mark a shift in how the NHS thinks about its future, particularly through the lens of the NHS 10 Year Health Plan. Not because everything will suddenly be perfect, but because the system seems to be recognising more openly than before that something has to change.
Over the last few years, England’s health system has published a series of long-term strategies that all point in the same general direction. More care in communities, more emphasis on prevention, better use of digital tools and a sustainable approach to staffing. The NHS 10 Year Health Plan brings those ideas together in one place and gives them a name, even if the path forward still feels uncertain. It sets out a model of care from hospital to community, analogue to digital and sickness to prevention.
Ambitious goals sit alongside everyday pressure
As part of the planning round for 2025/26 and beyond, NHS leaders set ambitious goals including improved waiting times and productivity. Those aims sit within the NHS medium term planning framework, which translates high level aspirations into operational priorities for the next few years. It talks about reducing bureaucracy, restoring local care access and slashing waiting times.
Yet for many staff, targets on paper show up as extra pressure. Workforce growth has slowed compared with earlier years: the total NHS workforce in England was about 1.38 million full time workers in late 2025, only around 1.1% higher than the previous year, down from faster growth in prior periods. Meanwhile, staff take sick leave at notable rates, with a 5.3% sickness absence rate in late 2025 (higher than the year before) and mental health problems such as anxiety and stress accounting for a large share of those lost days.
These numbers matter because they give a sense of the human context behind plans and priorities. Strategic shifts don’t land in a vacuum; they land amid workloads, rota gaps and health challenges experienced by real people.
Workforce planning: a decade in the making
A key part of realising the NHS 10 Year Health Plan is its sibling document, the NHS 10 Year Workforce Plan, due in spring 2026. This is meant to build on earlier workforce strategy work and set out how staffing needs can be matched to the future model of care. Government calls for evidence note this will replace the NHS’s long term workforce plan and align directly with the 10 Year Health Plan.
What is clear from existing analysis is that workforce shortages remain a long term pressure point, and that retention (not just recruitment) will be central. Reports highlight the need for more training, better use of data for planning and bridging the gap between strategy and everyday workforce experience.
It is easy to forget that behind every statistic about workforce numbers are individual careers, experiences and stresses. The plan’s success will depend not just on headcount, but on whether healthcare professionals feel supported to stay, develop and thrive in their roles.
Community, prevention and what it feels like on the ground
A major strand of the NHS 10 Year Health Plan is strengthening NHS community services and embedding the NHS prevention strategy more deeply into everyday care.
If more care happens early and closer to home, the thinking goes, then fewer people will reach crisis points that require emergency or hospital care. It is a compelling idea, and central to the logic of shifting work out of hospitals into communities.
But data and experience paint a picture of pressure. Emergency departments across England remain stretched, with multiple trusts declaring critical incidents in early 2026 due to surges of flu, norovirus and other respiratory illnesses. Frontline teams describe exceptionally high demand even before the day begins.
Tying more care into NHS community services and proactive prevention could ease some of that load over time, but it requires people, resources and careful coordination. This isn’t change that happens overnight.
The weight of workplace stress and safety concerns
Another part of the context for staff is what staff actually experience on the job. Recent data reveal a worrying rise in violence and aggression against NHS workers, with 1 in 7 NHS staff (14.38%) experienced physical violence from patients, their relatives or other members of the public. Unions and professionals have described this as a “national emergency,” and for many staff this is not abstract but a daily reality.
At the same time, sickness absence data quietly tells its own story about how people are coping. Anxiety, stress, depression and other mental health conditions are now the most common reasons for NHS staff being off work, accounting for more than 638,900 full time equivalent days lost and around a quarter of all sickness absence in January 2025.
These human pressures remind us gently but insistently that reforms must pay attention to wellbeing and retention as much as to targets and digital innovation.
Digital change can help – but only if the staff shape it
Digital transformation appears across the NHS medium term planning framework and the NHS 10 Year Health Plan as an enabler of integrated, efficient care. The idea of more connected systems, data flows and smarter tools is not futuristic – it is a response to perennial frustration over disjointed IT and siloed information.
But there is a common thread in staff feedback that digital tools support wellbeing only if they reduce friction rather than add to it. Too often, poorly implemented digital systems can feel like extra work rather than a solution.
If digital transformation is to become part of the lived improvement experience, it must be co-designed with those who use it most days. That means clinicians, administrators, community teams – and every person in between – having a voice not just in what changes, but how it changes.
Why 2026 still feels like a hinge year
Looking across these plans – the NHS 10 Year Health Plan, the forthcoming NHS 10 Year Workforce Plan, the NHS medium term planning framework, and the discussions around strengthening NHS community services and driving an NHS prevention strategy – there is a rare alignment of big picture vision.
That does not guarantee success. Plans can look good on paper and feel daunting in practice. Some staff will feel hopeful, others anxious; structural change and redundancy pressures have made many healthcare professionals wary of being sidelined rather than supported.
But if 2026 becomes genuinely pivotal, it will not be because a document was published. It will be because the people who work in the NHS feel seen in those plans, feel listened to, and experience changes that support them as much as they support patients.
Change that feels rooted in human wellbeing (not just organisational efficiency) is the sort of change that sticks.
And for many people working in the NHS, that would be a turning point worth holding on to.
