Tomorrow's World - how today’s innovations will shape the next decade 

The 33rd Summer Olympic Games. The 17th UEFA Football Championship. The 58th UK General Election. Although it’s not quite over, 2024 has seen a whole range of highlights, anniversaries and milestones over the course of the past eleven months. As the nights draw in and thoughts start to turn to all that 2025 has to offer, the IHPN has been reflecting on its own (much smaller) milestone – the tenth edition of our annual summit.

In commemorating the past decade of bringing together our members with policy makers, NHS leaders and politicians, we wanted to reflect not only on where the independent sector has come from, but where it might go in the next ten years.

Of course, we’re not the only ones thinking ahead to the future, with the NHS currently carrying out consultations, bringing together working groups and canvassing the public on what they want to see from the NHS in the future ahead of the development of their 10 Year Plan for Health. Over the summer we carried out a similar exercise, asking our members to think about where they see the independent sector in 2034, whether in considering the innovations in care and technology that will change the way people are treated, the relationship between patients, providers and insurers, or how they saw the ties between the NHS and the sector growing and maturing. This activity resulted in a new report launched at our summit last Wednesday – Tomorrow’s World.

We held interviews with seventeen of our members and sector stakeholders, representing a broad sweep of providers across the patient pathway, from primary, community, and diagnostic services through to acute hospitals, insurers and think tanks. We wanted them to think about the big changes they’d seen the independent sector undergo in the past few years, identify the innovations and developments they were most excited by in the present, and consider where the independent sector might find itself in the 2030s.

What we heard covered a whole host of reasons to be cheerful, with the sector likely to play an increasingly pivotal role in healthcare delivery, meeting the needs of rising numbers of NHS and private patients (both self-pay and insured). Members were positive that the public’s focus on meaningful choice around their own healthcare, underpinned by a desire for quick access to services and enabled by digital technologies, would provide a stable basis for private healthcare into the future. They shared some of the insights and innovations that improvements in technology were offering providers as well as patients, such as quicker and more accurate diagnostics, robotics-enabled surgery or personalised preventative approaches and medicines. All of these were likely to become more widespread and cheaper in the years to come, making them increasingly accessible to their patients and helping to improve outcomes.

Members were not only optimistic about treatment and technology. They saw the independent sector widening its offer to more routine preventative, primary care and mental health treatment in the years to come, reinforced by integrated service provision so that providers were able to offer more seamless services across patient pathways. This sense of integration also extended to the relationship with the NHS, with some interviewees anticipating an increasingly mature and pragmatic relationship between providers and the public sector. Members saw the services that they offer to the NHS being embedded in policy development, commissioning and treatment, collaborating with the NHS as much providing competition.

All of the developments and themes members identified were not some way off, but had all started to take root in the ways they were working with others, thinking about their own organisations and treating patients. They were clear that, while expectations around the way healthcare is provided may change, tomorrow’s patient will benefit from the investment in relationships, care and technology being made today. Describing future markets is of course intrinsically uncertain and speculative (and perhaps foolhardy!), but we hope the themes and broader trends identified in our report provide helpful insight for the sector, and will very much inform the work of IHPN in supporting our members in the years to come as they meet the needs of increasing numbers of NHS and private patients.