NHS Surrey and Sussex has worked with partners to develop a five-year strategic commissioning plan, which is a requirement set out in NHS England’s Medium-Term Planning Framework which was published in October 2025.
A draft submission was made to NHS England in February 2026; we expect to publish the full plan once approved in the summer.
With our overall aim to plan focuses on four interconnected areas of opportunity for the next five years:
- Reducing the growth and progression of ill health, through scaled prevention and early intervention programmes targeting the conditions driving nearly half of future demand, including cardiovascular disease, diabetes, respiratory disease, obesity, chronic kidney disease and anxiety and depression.
- Transforming models of care by redesigning pathways around people and populations – expanding digital first access, integrated neighbourhood teams, proactive care for those with serious mental illness, reformed planned care and re-imaging outpatient models, and high-quality community-based palliative and rehabilitation services.
- Improving care for our most disadvantaged communities through targeted, place-based commissioning that narrows the widest gaps in access and outcomes, including paediatric hubs, community-based screening and outreach, and strengthened neighbourhood mental health support in areas of highest deprivation.
- Delivering structural change and system reform, rebalancing investment from acute to community and prevention, reshaping the estate, modernising digital infrastructure, and aligning workforce, financial and commissioning levers to support long-term transformation.
Together, these programmes represent a deliberate left shift: from sickness to prevention, hospital to community, and analogue to digital – fully aligned with national reform and the NHS 10 Year Health Plan.