The 10-Year NHS Plan: A Wake-Up Call for the Care Home Sector

Robbie Flower, Holistic Care & Wellbeing Lead | Estimated Read Time: 6 minutes

In July 2025, NHS England officially laid down a bold vision for the next decade: a shift from hospital to community, from analogue to digital, and from sickness to prevention. While the headline beneficiaries might appear to be primary care, outpatient services, or digital-first initiatives, the ripple effects of this strategy will land squarely on the care home sector.

For care home operators, tech leads, and decision makers, now is not the time to wait - it’s the moment to prepare. Here’s how the ‘10 Year Plan’ changes the game, and how you can stay ahead.

Key Shifts and Their Implications for Care Homes

Below are the three central strategic shifts in the long-term plan, and what they mean for care homes in practice.

1. From hospital to community: more care at home and in local settings

The NHS is committed to delivering more care outside hospital walls, bringing services into people’s homes and local settings. 

Implications for care homes:

• You will be expected to act as part of the “community health footprint” - supporting early interventions, monitoring, and outpatient follow-ups.

• Closer integration with community teams (district nursing, physiotherapy, mental health outreach) means tighter data sharing and communication.

• You’ll take on more complexity of patient care (e.g. more advanced monitoring, diagnostics, telehealth) that once sat in hospitals.

If your systems can’t support that, you risk becoming a bottleneck rather than a partner in the new ecosystem.

2. From analogue to digital: the technology imperative

A core pillar of the plan is freeing staff from administrative burden and enabling people to manage their care as seamlessly as online banking or shopping.

Implications for care homes:

• Digital records, interoperability, automated workflows, alerts, and dashboards become table stakes.

• Staff time must shift from paperwork to proactive care.

• Secure, resilient connectivity will underpin every service you run - from teleconsultations to remote monitoring, from alert systems to uploading to NHS systems.

• Data security, compliance (e.g. GDPR, NHS data standards), and uptime become not optional extras but critical capabilities.

Care homes that remain stuck in siloed systems, paper files, or fragile networks will be pushed to the back of the queue for funding, referrals, or partnership.

3. From sickness to prevention: shifting the care model

The NHS wants to reach patients earlier, tackle inequalities, and make the healthy choice the easy choice. 

Implications for care homes:

• You become a point of early detection: timely identification of deterioration, infection control, data-led alerts for risk factors (falls, dehydration, cognitive decline).

• You shift more toward wellness, rehabilitation, and keeping residents out of hospital.

• Outcome-based commissioning may emerge: your performance on avoiding hospitalisations, managing chronic conditions, or preventing decline could be scrutinised and incentivised.

In short: the bar for how “good” a care home operation is will no longer be just survival - it will be its role in preventing, detecting and responding.

Challenges and Strategic Priorities

These shifts bring opportunity, but also risk. Some of the most pressing challenges care homes will face are:

• Legacy infrastructureMany care homes still rely on patchy WiFi, ageing servers, remote sites with weak connectivity. Upgrading is costly, disruptive and complex.

• Interoperability / standards gapNHS and third party systems (EMIS, SystmOne, GP Connect, shared care records) use specific data standards and protocols. If your IT can’t talk to theirs reliably, you’ll be sidelined.

• Security & compliance burdenHandling protected health data, adhering to NHS standards, audits, incident responses - these are nontrivial, especially for organisations without deep IT capacity.

• Organisational change resistanceStaff may resist digital change; culture shift is needed. Rolling out new systems, training, change management… it’s a ‘people’ challenge as much as a ‘tech’ one.

• Funding & procurement constraintsCare homes often operate on tight margins - capital investment is hard and procurement cycles are long. Payback must be demonstrable and relatively swift.

To survive (and ideally thrive) care homes must prioritise:

• Building resilient, secure, high-bandwidth network infrastructure

• Choosing interoperable, cloud-friendly systems

• Embracing data, AI and alerting to support preventive care

• Partnering with specialist providers who understand healthcare networks

Which leads us to why Cloud Gateway is uniquely positioned to support this sector through the transition.

Cloud Gateway: Your Connectivity and Compliance Partner in the Transition

At Cloud Gateway, we specialise in designing and delivering network infrastructure solutions tailored for healthcare, hospice, and care providers. Our heritage in the healthcare domain means we understand NHS compliance, HSCN connectivity, data sovereignty, and uptime expectations.

How we help the care home sector navigate the NHS 10-year plan:

Secure, compliant connectivity

We are an HSCN-accredited CN-SP and understand NHS standards. We help care homes integrate with essential systems and data exchanges, ensuring connectivity meets the most stringent requirements.

Cloud-friendly networking

As cloud adoption accelerates, we provide a private connectivity fabric to AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, and more - enabling care home operations, telehealth services, and remote monitoring systems to operate with low latency and high reliability.

Rapid deployment and flexibility

Traditional providers often have 30-90 day lead times. We work to reduce those delays so you can scale as demands change.

Managed support and compliance guidance

We don’t just deliver circuits - we act as an extension of your IT team. From ODS codes to compliance paperwork, audits, and incident planning, we help you cross the T’s and dot the I’s.

Budget alignment

We offer OPEX-friendly models suitable for care homes working under tight financial constraints. You get enterprise-grade infrastructure without breaking capital budgets.

By partnering with a provider like Cloud Gateway, care organisations can offload the complexity of bidding for compliance, building connectivity, and integrating with NHS systems - so that leadership and carers can focus where it matters most: resident care, early detection, and integration with future NHS programmes.

Final Word

The NHS’s ambitions over the next ten years will transform how care is delivered - and care homes will move from being passive recipients to active collaborators. Those that prepare (by modernising their infrastructure, embracing data, and building secure connectivity foundations) will be in demand. Those that don’t risk becoming stranded.

Now is the moment for decision makers and tech leads in the care home sector to act decisively. 

Move infrastructure off your worries list and get the connectivity, compliance and support your home needs. Discover how Cloud Gateway can help.