Comment: The 10-year NHS Plan – What Is the Challenge for Guildford?

Published on: 8 Jul, 2025
Updated on: 10 Jul, 2025

The Guildford Society is supporting improved community based healthcare services in Guildford in line with the NHS 10-year plan and best practice. To be effective, these services need new purpose built facilities where all the disciplines can be based to provide seamless patient focused care.

Services could include GPs, podiatry, mental health, dentistry, physiotherapy, treatment procedures, pharmacy, health and wellbeing services, children’s services, etc.

Guildford’s residents, especially in areas with highest deprivation, are poorly served by not having integrated services accessible from 21st century facilities.

Alistair Smith, chair of the Guildford Society.

By Alistair Smith

chair of The Guildford Society

The Government has now published its 10-year Plan for the NHS. The overall objective is to move more patient care into local communities.

The plan says: “New health centres will house neighbourhood teams. They will not only bring historically hospital-based services into the community – diagnostics, post-operative care, and rehab – but will also offer services like debt advice, employment support and stop smoking or weight management, all of which will help tackle issues which we know affect people’s health.”

Being treated closer to their homes or at home is the preference of most patients and surveys show better health outcomes and lower costs for the NHS.

True “integrated care” will be delivered where there is seamless, joined-up care pathway focused on each patient’s individual needs. The Plan also envisages a digital future.

Patient monitoring will change fundamentally. Multi-disciplinary teams providing a range of primary care services will operate out of GP practices.

Innovative new services like so called “Virtual Wards” will operate more extensively. This will free up hospitals to do what they do best, treating patients with acute care needs and reducing waiting times.

The Royal Surrey, like all NHS hospitals, is in a continuous struggle to keep waiting times down and would benefit enormously if patients, particularly outpatients, could be treated by GPs and other health professionals.

But this can only happen if there is somewhere locally for them to go.

Guildford’s capability is seriously hampered by the absence of modern, purpose-built facilities designed to deliver neighbourhood health services.

This is particularly apparent in areas such as north Guildford with the highest levels of deprivation and poorer health among the town’s population.

The Jarvis Centre in Stoughton is a possible site for a new health centre providing a wide range of services.

Guildford hasn’t seen any new facilities built for primary and community health care for approximately 40 years.

Health services which are constrained by cramped, poorly equipped buildings can only offer a limited range of services, particularly for those patients with a range of complex needs.

The NHS Surrey Heartlands Integrated Care Board’s own statutory risk register recognises the parlous state of GP premises in Guildford and across Surrey. They own up to “premises which cannot deliver fit-for-purpose primary care”.

Also, it says, “if current primary care estates capacity is not increased, then this could prevent any work stream aimed at bringing services from hospital to community”.

While current demand is not being met, things will only get worse as Guildford’s population grows. Between four and five thousand new homes are being built which could add 10-15,000 new patients needing access to health care services in the next five years.

Elsewhere in the country innovative primary and community facilities provide their local populations with comprehensive, integrated care. The Tessa Jowell Health Centre in London is an example.

The Tessa Jowell Centre, in South East London is an example of a modern, multi-function health centre

This healthcare centre is key to the transformation of primary and community health and wellbeing services across south Southwark. It is designed to integrate primary, community health and wellbeing services to meet the needs of growing local population and delivers much-needed improvement to local health services in East Dulwich, South East London.

The building is purpose-built as a health hub for the local community and the facility is at the heart of local health commissioner’s efforts to transform GP and community-based services in Dulwich and the surrounding area.

Other new health centre examples can be viewed on the Guildford Society website.

You might ask why this hasn’t been happening in Guildford, one of the richest towns in the country?

In 2019, the then Surrey Heartlands Clinical Commissioning Group, now succeeded by the Surrey Heartlands Integrated Care Board, published plans for the development of two new primary and community care facilities. One was at a site in Park Barn which has subsequently been sold. The other was for the redevelopment of the NHS owned Jarvis Centre.

The Guildford Society, St Catherine’s Village and Onslow Residents Associations, Guildford Borough Council and others participated as members of the Stakeholder Reference Group. You can read some of the story in the opinion piece Reorganisation of Guildford GP Practices Would Lead to Poorer Service published in The Dragon in December 2021.

The process to develop these proposals ceased in early 2023. Nothing has happened since to progress new facilities. According to the ICB this is through a lack of funds. The ICB decided that it had other priorities which have constrained the development of neighbourhood health which for 25 years has been the preferred NHS policy.

Throughout this period it has allocated tens of millions of pounds into the redevelopment of the Royal Surrey. The RSCH has during the same period built one of strongest balance sheets of any NHS hospital in the country, meaning that it had its own money to finance development projects.

The Guildford Society has lobbied the Surrey Heartlands Integrated Care Board intensively for the past two years without any success. Our latest proposals were submitted in April which can be accessed via the Society’s website.

We can see no ICB strategy for neighbourhood health and no plans to fund it adequately in the future. The question is when will the Board publish its intentions to provide a comprehensive community care service for the town and beyond to deliver the NHS 10 Year Plan?

Guildford is a long, long way behind. The Government has set out the vision. It’s time for local health managers to seize the day.