10 year health plan for the NHS
At NICE, we’re poised to deliver key commitments in the government’s 10 year plan for health and care.
We’re delighted by the plan’s endorsement of NICE’s role in delivering faster, and fairer access to the best innovations.
It will strengthen our role in the system, guided by our core purpose. And it will enable us to become more relevant, timely, usable and impactful, through the delivery of three priorities:
- Faster, fairer roll out of high impact healthtech
- Updating guidance to drive smarter spending
- Parallel decisions for faster access
We’re ready. Over the past few years, we’ve been laying the foundations for these approaches through our transformation plan. It means we have already started delivering on the 10 year plan, using our expanded remit to carry out smarter innovations across the system.
Faster, fairer rollout of high impact healthtech
The way we treat illness is changing. Technology is opening up new ways to care for patients, diagnose conditions earlier, and help people stay healthier for longer.
But too often, these innovations are rolled out unevenly. There are over half a million healthtech products available in the UK, with multiple routes into the NHS and wide variations in requirements. This makes for a confusing landscape, through the 10 year plan we’re empowered to change this.
Our new approach will apply clear requirements for the evaluation of high-impact digital tools, medical devices and diagnostics in a similar way as we do for medicines. We plan to test the pathway with a few technologies, initially, with a view to increasing numbers in future years. Our recommendations will send the strongest signal that an innovation will make a significant impact to patients and offer good value. We'll work with partners to ensure our recommendations are adopted by the health service.
If a new technology is safe, effective, high impact, and proves its value to patients, we’ll recommend it for use across the NHS in England. That means it can receive national NHS funding – just like a medicine would – and be rolled out fairly across the country.
This innovative approach will strengthen NHS decision-making and provide a more coordinated path to the NHS for healthtech developers.
The implementation of a new pathway for healthtech is also part of the government’s Life Science Sector Plan and will position the NHS as a powerful customer for one of the UK’s fastest-growing industries.
First steps
We’re laying the foundations for this work by inviting our partners and stakeholders to consult on changes to the existing health technology appraisal manual in September and October 2025. The following updates to our methods and processes will ensure we can deliver on the ambitions of the 10 year plan.
We expect to announce the first topics, following ministerial approval, in December 2025, with the first appraisals starting by February 2026.
Updating guidance to drive smarter spending
The NHS touches all our lives. It has provided healthcare for all, free at the point of delivery for more than 75 years. With growing pressures, rising demand and limited budgets, it now must make smart, evidence-based choices about how to put the best, and most cost-effective care in place. People want to know these choices are guided by the latest evidence on what actually works for patients.
Our whole life-cycle approach will help the NHS stay up to date with best practice. We will maintain up-to-date guidance reflecting changes in evidence, costs, and clinical practice. Through this approach, we’ll continually review what works best, establish where care can be improved, and highlight where treatments should evolve over time.
This means we won’t just assess a new medicine or treatment once and move on. We’ll keep reviewing the evidence as it grows – so that NHS care remains focused on what benefits patients most.
This approach will help clinicians make clearer decisions and ensure care can improve year after year. It will also mean treatments are delivered in the right order, with different options sequenced so patients are given the best care first, and know what alternatives are available if the first option doesn’t work.
It will also enable us to expand access to cost-effective innovations, including biosimilars. This will allow us to provide clearer decision pathways for clinicians, and phase out less effective innovations to create financial headroom for tomorrow’s clinical breakthroughs.
By continuously updating our guidance, NICE will help the NHS reinvest in what matters most, ensuring that doctors and health services can offer care that reflects the most up to date evidence, and offers the best value for the NHS. This is how we protect the NHS in the long run. Not by doing less, but by doing more of what works.
First steps
In September 2025 we published our first guidance that uses the new whole cycle approach. An estimated 614,000 adults in England have heart failure, our new recommendations could prevent around 3,000 deaths and 5,500 hospital admissions caused by heart failure, each year.
For this update, we reviewed the emerging evidence quickly to keep pace with changes in the treatment landscape. Our updated guidance on chronic heart failure expands access to proven treatments, offering life-saving medicines to patients up to a year earlier than before. GPs can now also start these medicines with specialist advice, rather than patients having to wait for a heart failure specialist appointment.
Parallel decisions for faster access
We’re helping to deliver the government’s ambition to streamline regulation and market access. By April 2026, better alignment between NICE and the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) will enable us to bring medicines to patients 3 – 6 months sooner.
We'll ensure that our processes remain rigorous, independent and transparent. But instead of NICE determining the clinical and cost effectiveness of treatments after MHRA rule on their safety, where possible both decisions will be published at the same time. This will mean earlier recommendations and support for a thriving life science sector.
Closer alignment with our regulatory partners, will offer real, tangible differences to patients. We’ll be able to bring promising medicines to the people that need them, sooner.
This project will bring several benefits to the regulatory process; through closer working with the MHRA, we’ll be able to deliver a much simpler pathway, resulting in earlier and aligned decisions, build our relationship, consolidate processes and identify areas where improvements can be made.
First steps
In October 2025, NICE and MHRA are holding a joint webinar to explain early plans for collaboration to achieve the aligned pathway, supported by information sharing and joint scientific advice. Following the webinar, the pathway will be open for early adopters selected by NICE and MHRA. NICE will schedule all new topics onto the aligned pathway wherever possible, enabling us to rigorously challenge the pathway prior to launch in the new year.
Turning ambition into action
Our new processes will support the wider ambitions of the 10 year plan - such as the 'single national formulary', led by NHS England, that will replace local lists for medicines. We will continue to work with our system partners to make the whole plan a reality. The shift from analogue to digital, hospital to community and treatment to prevention will make our healthcare system stronger, sustainable and more robust for future generations.
We’re grateful to our partners for their collaboration and support with this exciting plan and look forward to turning this shared ambition into meaningful, lasting change.
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