Healthcare Planning Network: Rethinking Neighbourhood Health Centres, Lessons from Practice and Implications for the Future

Neighbourhood Health Centres (NHCs) sit at the heart of the NHS’s ambition to deliver integrated, preventative, and place‑based care. Recent guidance emphasises moving beyond buildings as static assets towards dynamic infrastructure that can adapt to changing population needs, workforce models, and digital innovation.

During a recent Healthcare Planning Network session, network members reflected on real‑world experiences of neighbourhood‑based provision – including current examples, legacy LIFT estates, and the practical barriers to integration. These insights offer valuable lessons as systems plan the next generation of neighbourhood health centres.

What Good Looks Like: Examples of Effective Neighbourhood Health Centres

Sarah Butler highlighted the Living Well Hub in Warrington as a particularly strong and tangible example of how a neighbourhood health centre can operate in practice. Located in Warrington town centre, the hub functions as a health and wellbeing space rather than a traditional clinical building, deliberately designed to be welcoming, accessible, and non‑medicalised.

The ground floor operates as an open, community‑facing environment offering a mix of booked appointments (via referral) and informal drop‑ins, with clinical spaces located on the first floor. This separation of functions helps to normalise engagement with health support and reduces the sense of crossing a clinical threshold, supporting earlier access and prevention.

Crucially, the hub is actively managed, rather than passively occupied. It operates with a dedicated general manager, two co‑ordinators, and a front‑of‑house role positioned at a lectern rather than a traditional reception desk. These roles are built into the ongoing revenue model, reinforcing the importance of coordination, navigation, and relationship‑building as core infrastructure rather than optional extras.

Living Well Warrington is delivered through a collaborative partnership model, with four main providers operating under a formal collaboration agreement. As part of the agreement, the partners also make space available free of charge to community and voluntary sector groups, strengthening the hub’s role as shared neighbourhood infrastructure.

This combination of intentional design, collaborative governance, shared financial responsibility, and active management offers a powerful illustration of how a neighbourhood health centre can move beyond co‑location towards genuine integration. The model has already been externally recognised, achieving ‘highly commended’ status at the HSJ Awards following its first year of operation, and is now approaching the end of its second year.

Living Well Warrington demonstrates that successful neighbourhood health centres are not defined solely by their buildings, but by how space, people, funding, and purpose are brought together around the needs of the local population.

Similarly, reflections on East Lancashire Building Partnership Ltd site (Accrington Acorn Primary Care Centre) pointed to the strengths of well‑designed estate. These developments demonstrated that:

• Buildings designed with adaptability in mind make it easier to change service configurations over time

• Flexible internal layouts support evolving clinical models and non‑clinical uses

• High‑quality estate reduces maintenance backlogs and supports long‑term operational resilience

The key insight here is that the physical asset matters, but only when it enables service change rather than constrains it.

‘Health estate work best where they are designed for change, not certainty’ – Emma Ingham 

This acknowledges that neighbourhood needs, workforce models, and technology will continue to evolve and the estate needs to be adaptable to support these changes.

Persistent Challenges and Barriers

Despite positive examples, the session also surfaced consistent structural and cultural challenges.

Integration Versus Co‑location

A recurring theme was that often estates deliver co‑location, not integration. While services are brought under one roof, organisational silos often remained intact. Separate governance, funding streams, and performance frameworks meant that proximity did not automatically translate into joined‑up care.

This raises a crucial question for new neighbourhood health centres: How do we design for integration of behaviours and outcomes, not just services?

Financial Fragmentation

Participants highlighted the absence of a truly integrated financial pot. Health, local authority, and voluntary sector partners often operate within separate financial regimes, making joint planning and shared risk difficult.

This is compounded by a tendency to default to “cheap estate” solutions, particularly under financial pressure. While understandable, this can undermine long‑term value by limiting flexibility and embedding future constraints into the system.

Operational and Workforce Challenges

Even where buildings are well designed, challenges remain around:

• Getting organisations and professionals to genuinely work together

• Managing change across multiple partners with different cultures and incentives

• Ensuring centres do not become over‑medicalised and disconnected from community life

Implications for Future Neighbourhood Health Centre Planning

Drawing together the session feedback and current policy direction, several principles emerge:

1.      Design for Change, Not Certainty

Neighbourhood health centres must be modular, flexible, and reconfigurable, able to respond to changes in population need, service models, and digital delivery.

2.      Integration Is a Behaviour, Not a Building

Physical co‑location should be paired with aligned incentives, shared governance, and active change management. Without this, centres risk repeating the mistakes of earlier models.

3.      Anchor Centres in Their Communities

Neighbourhood infrastructure should feel organic rather than imposed, reflecting the reality that communities already build informal networks of support. Centres should amplify what exists, not replace it.

4.      Plan Finance and Estate Together

Long‑term value comes from whole‑life planning, not short‑term affordability. Integrated financial approaches remain critical if neighbourhood models are to mature.

5.      Work with Local Government and Wider Partners as Equal Contributors

Local authorities, VCSE organisations, and other neighbourhood partners bring deep place‑based knowledge, trusted relationships, assets, and community infrastructure. Neighbourhood health centres are most effective when health, local government, voluntary, community, and other public sector partners work together as equals, with shared accountability for outcomes. Dual‑use estate, community access, and joint operational models must be intentionally designed, actively governed, and supported by clear collaboration agreements, rather than left to evolve informally or by chance.

Conclusion

Neighbourhood health centres represent a significant opportunity to reshape how care is delivered at place and neighbourhood level. The experience shared through the Healthcare Planning Network session reinforces that success depends as much on culture, relationships, and flexibility as it does on bricks and mortar.

The challenge for the next generation of neighbourhood health centres is to move beyond lessons half‑learnt – creating infrastructure that enables integration, supports prevention, and remains resilient in the face of constant change.

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The gbp Healthcare Planning Network is a dedicated network for healthcare planners to share ideas and experiences, and connect to peers. This article refers to discussions during the session on Neighbourhood Health Centres in March 2026 led by Nathalie Wade of gbp consult.