NHS England publishes NHS priorities for 2025/26

Commenting in her foreword, Amanda Pritchard, NHS Chief Executive, said:"The 10 Year Health Plan gives us reason to hope for a better future, but it doesn’t give us licence to pause for breath. We have a rare opportunity to set out a bold vision for the future and chart an ambitious course for the coming years. But a relentless focus on improvement is needed now more than ever – to deliver services for patients who need them today, and to continue to lay the foundations on which a better future can be built."

The national priorities to improve patient outcomes in 2025/26 are as follows:

• Reduce the time people wait for elective care, improving the percentage of patients waiting no longer than 18 weeks for elective treatment to 65% nationally by March 2026, with every trust expected to deliver a minimum 5% point improvement. Systems are expected to continue to improve performance against the cancer 62-day and 28-day Faster Diagnosis Standard (FDS) to 75% and 80% respectively by March 2026
• Improve A&E waiting times and ambulance response times compared to 2024/25, with a minimum of 78% of patients seen within 4 hours in March 2026. Category 2 ambulance response times should average no more than 30 minutes across 2025/26
• Improve patients’ access to general practice, improving patient experience, and improve access to urgent dental care, providing 700,000 additional urgent dental appointments
• Improve patient flow through mental health crisis and acute pathways, reducing average length of stay in adult acute beds, and improve access to children and young people’s (CYP) mental health services, to achieve the national ambition for 345,000 additional CYP aged 0 to 25 compared to 2019

Responding to the guidance, Sarah Woolnough, Chief Executive of The King’s Fund, said: "This guidance to the NHS echoes the government’s strong focus on bringing down long waits for planned hospital care and recovering performance in A&E. If achieved, it will bring improvements for many patients, but emphasis in these areas will inevitably mean other services get deprioritised.

"Tackling the backlog of people needing planned care is important but should not be taken as the sole measure of what a health and care system is meant to deliver. Achieving the target of patients being seen for planned hospital care within 18 weeks will seem like a small and isolated victory in four years’ time if it meant the government took its eye off the ball in reforming adult social care, helping the NHS to turn into a prevention-focused service that helps keep people well, and reducing health inequalities between different parts of the country. 

"The plan also hopes for ambitious efficiency gains to free up much needed resources, but few people working in the NHS will think it will be delivered without harming the quality of patient care over the coming year. In truth, national leaders are in an invidious position. As can be seen in NHS services across the country today, the fragility of the health service is such that a predictable spike in seasonal infections can bring huge swathes of the NHS to a standstill. The population is getting sicker, and the government has chosen to grow NHS funding at broadly average levels, so there are difficult trade-offs to be made. 

"The plan reduces the number of national targets, meaning local NHS leaders will have more flexibility to make decisions about which services should be prioritised in their communities. The healthcare services which should be prioritised in Blackpool will not necessarily be the same as in Cornwall. However, it means many of the tough decisions about what to deprioritise are also being pushed down to a local level. The worry is that the spending that often gets pared back is on services to keep people healthy. These are exactly the areas that need most investment to ensure a health service that is sustainable into the future." 

To view the plan in full, visit: NHS England » 2025/26 priorities and operational planning guidance