The New Hospital Programme (NHP), announced by the Prime Minister in October 2020, is the biggest hospital building programme in a generation. It is a 10-year Government Major Project, part of the wider Health Infrastructure Plan, a long-term, rolling programme of strategic investment in health and care buildings, estates, and equipment.  It is a dramatic shift in the way we deliver major healthcare projects in England, building hospitals that will transform the health sector and set new standards for the way we build future social infrastructure, prioritising sustainability, digital technology and the latest construction methods.

The high-level fixed scope includes delivery of 48 hospitals, by 2030, built in phases across the decade. Each of the new hospitals will replace outdated infrastructure and deliver brand new, state-of-the-art facilities to ensure world-class provision of healthcare through innovation and collaboration, empowering clinical professionals to deliver the best possible care for patients. The long-term investment in these new hospitals will ensure the NHS can continue to provide world-class care right across the country in the years to come. 

To successfully deliver these projects, the Programme will need to tackle not just estate and building issues, but will also need to work across the NHS to understand and develop new repeatable design components, new sustainability standards, evolve digital technologies, support new care and workforce models, develop healthcare planning capabilities and support developing regional and system wide approaches to location-based healthcare. Capturing learning from across healthcare and from the pandemic the NHP has the opportunity to impact all facets of infection prevention and control and improve outcomes for our patients and workforce.