The NHS 10-Year Plan: a wake-up call for the care home sector

The NHS 10-Year Health Plan, published in January 2025, sets out NHS England’s direction for the next decade: a shift from hospital to community, from analogue to digital, and from treating illness to preventing it. The headline beneficiaries may appear to be primary care, outpatient services, and digital-first platforms, but the ripple effects of this strategy will land squarely on the care home sector.

For care home operators, tech leads, and decision-makers, this is the moment to prepare rather than wait.

Three shifts and what they mean for care homes

• From hospital to community. The plan is explicit about delivering more care outside hospital walls – in people’s homes, in community settings, and through integrated local health partnerships. For care homes, this means a more active role in the health system, not a peripheral one. Closer integration with district nursing, physiotherapy, and mental health outreach teams requires tighter data sharing and communication. More complex patient care – advanced monitoring, diagnostics, and telehealth – will increasingly be expected in care settings that once referred those cases elsewhere.

Care homes whose systems cannot support this integration will become bottlenecks rather than partners in the new care ecosystem.

• From analogue to digital. A core commitment in the plan is freeing clinical staff from administrative burden and enabling people to manage their care as seamlessly as they manage their banking. For care homes, this translates to digital records, interoperable systems, automated workflows, and real-time alerting becoming baseline expectations rather than aspirational features. Staff time must shift from paperwork to proactive care. Secure, resilient connectivity will underpin every service – from teleconsultations and remote monitoring to uploading data to NHS systems. Data security, compliance with NHS data standards, and high availability become operational requirements, not optional extras.

Care homes that remain on siloed systems, paper files, or fragile networks risk being sidelined in funding decisions, referral pathways, and partnership arrangements.

• From sickness to prevention. The plan places significant emphasis on reaching patients earlier, tackling health inequalities, and keeping people out of hospital. For care homes, this means becoming points of early detection: timely identification of deterioration, infection control, and data-led alerts for risk factors including falls, dehydration, and cognitive decline. It also points toward outcome-based commissioning, where performance on avoiding hospitalisations and managing chronic conditions is scrutinised and incentivised.

The bar for what constitutes a well-run care home operation is changing.

The infrastructure challenges these shifts create

These strategic shifts are genuine opportunities. They are also accompanied by real and specific challenges.

Legacy infrastructure is the most common. Many care homes rely on patchy WiFi, ageing servers, and sites with weak or unreliable connectivity. Upgrading is costly, disruptive, and complex – but continuing to defer it makes the integration demands above unachievable.

Interoperability is the second challenge. NHS and third-party systems – EMIS, SystmOne, GP Connect, shared care records – use specific data standards and protocols. Care home IT that cannot communicate reliably with these systems will be functionally excluded from the integrated care model the plan describes.

Security and compliance represent a third and growing pressure. Handling protected health information, adhering to NHS data standards, managing audit trails, and responding to incidents are not trivial obligations for organisations without deep IT capacity. As care homes take on more complex clinical roles, the compliance obligations that come with that role increase proportionately.

The connectivity and compliance layer

Getting this right does not require building an NHS-grade IT function in-house. It does require a connectivity and security provider that understands healthcare environments, HSCN requirements, and the compliance obligations that come with handling patient data.

Cloud Gateway is an accredited HSCN CN-SP with experience across NHS trusts, private healthcare providers, and care organisations. We provide managed HSCN connectivity, private cloud connectivity to AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud, and the security infrastructure that care settings need to operate compliantly in an increasingly integrated NHS environment. We act as an extension of your IT team – from compliance paperwork and ODS codes through to audit support and incident planning.

The care organisations that prepare now – by modernising their infrastructure, building secure connectivity, and integrating with NHS systems – will be well placed as the 10-Year Plan reshapes how care is commissioned and delivered. Those that do not risk being structurally excluded from the partnerships and funding that follow.

For more on how we work with healthcare and care providers, see our Healthcare sector page, or talk to our team: