Our vision

High quality healthcare for all.

Our mission

• Drive the delivery of safe and high-quality care in the right place and at the right time for patients.
• Support NHS staff with the training, data and tools they need to provide the best possible care.
• Deliver value for money for taxpayers, supporting the health of the population and the wider economy.

What we do

NHS England has a wide range of statutory functions, responsibilities and regulatory powers, which are focused on supporting and overseeing the wider NHS to deliver effective and high quality care, as well as doing those things that are best done once for the whole NHS. These include:

1. working with government to agree funding and priorities for the NHS, and supporting local organisations to plan high quality services for patients
2. overseeing the delivery of safe and effective NHS services
3. driving best practice, improvement and innovation across the NHS
4. working with partners to plan, recruit, educate and train the NHS workforce
5. using the nation’s health data to drive research and transform services
6. negotiating the best possible deals for vital products and NHS services
7. delivering digital NHS services at scale for patients, staff and the public, which the NHS depends on every day

1. Working with government to agree funding and priorities for the NHS, and supporting local organisations to plan high quality services for patients, for example, we:

• allocate the £134 billion of funding agreed by government and Parliament to local NHS systems to enable the NHS to deliver high quality care and get best value for the taxpayer
• set the contractual arrangements and mandatory NHS requirements for nearly 30,000 general practitioners, dentists, community pharmacies and optometrists
• design and arrange over 80 essential physical and mental health services to support people with rare and complex conditions, including healthcare services for the armed forces community and people in the secure and detained estate, as well as sexual assault and abuse services

2. Overseeing the delivery of safe and effective NHS services, for example, we:

• monitor and support the performance of nearly 7,000 NHS organisations, holding them to account for service delivery, quality and safety
• deliver vaccination and screening programmes, such as our NHS adult screening programmes, which save around 10,000 lives a year and prevent ill health in many more
• lead on emergency planning and response to major incidents

3. Driving best practice, improvement and innovation across the NHS, for example, we:

• support organisations to deliver operational and clinical improvement through NHS IMPACT (Improving Patient Care Together)
• mobilise expert networks, such as Getting it Right First Time, to deliver innovation, improvement and reform across all services for patients
• run the world-leading NHS Genomic Medicine Service, which in 2023/24 delivered 810,000 genomic tests for over 7,000 rare diseases, and over 200 cancer clinical indications

4. Work with partners to plan, recruit, educate and train the NHS workforce, for example, we:

• deliver training and tools for the NHS workforce
• provide digital learning platforms, which 3.5 million staff use across the NHS
• support all NHS organisations to attract new talent and retain staff

5. Using the nation’s health data to drive research and transform NHS services, for example, we:

• have helped recruit over 1 million people to large-scale studies through our NHS DigiTrials service
• build and run secure data environments, which support researchers to develop new ways to improve patient care, for example, an AI-generated/enabled stethoscope
• have delivered the world-leading cancer vaccine launchpad, which means thousands of patients can enrol and get fast-tracked access to trials of personalised cancer vaccines

6. Negotiating the best possible deals for vital products and NHS services, for example, we:

• make sure people can benefit from innovative medicines and secure rapid access to clinically and cost-effective new treatments for hundreds of thousands of patients, with 85 NICE recommendations implemented over the last year
• have enabled more than 100,000 cancer patients to receive early access to the latest and most innovative cancer treatments through the Cancer Drugs Fund, with patients also benefiting from earlier access to non-cancer treatments through the Innovative Medicines Fund
• use our commercial capabilities to make medicines available to NHS patients 6 months faster than the EU average and to deliver half a billion pounds of efficiencies from the medicines budget in the past year; and across goods and services, we will also deliver £1.5 billion pounds of efficiency savings over the next 5 years

7. Delivering digital services at scale for patients, staff and the public, which the NHS depends on every day, for example, we:

• run the NHS App, which has been downloaded by over 36 million people, with an average of 10 million people logging into it each month to manage their health needs; that is in addition to running NHS 111 online and NHS.UK – trusted digital services that allow patients to conveniently access care
• deliver services and technology across the NHS, such as electronic patient record systems and the NHS Federated Data Platform, which are already helping to tackle waiting lists and reduce discharge delays in the majority of trusts
• support the IT infrastructure across the whole of the NHS and social care, joining together over 44,000 healthcare IT systems in 26,000 organisations, and protecting the NHS from cyber threats including by monitoring 2 million computers

Who we are

Our work supports the NHS to deliver high quality services for patients and best value for taxpayers.

Our staff have expertise across hundreds of specialisms – for example, clinical, operational, commissioning, technology, data science, cyber security, computer science, software engineering, education and training, and commercial – so we can design and deliver quality NHS services effectively.

We are led by a unitary board and we draw on a wide range of expert clinicians to make sure what we do is based on the best available evidence and real world experience of providing care.

Our Chief Executive Officer Sir James Mackey is accountable to Parliament and to the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care for the effective running of NHS England and the performance of the NHS across England.

As a single streamlined organisation covering the whole of England, we have 7 regional teams working directly with systems and NHS providers across the country.

Our values

As the leadership organisation for the NHS in England we share the NHS’s core values, which all staff in all settings are expected to demonstrate.

As a unique organisation within the NHS, we have also developed the following values:

• collaboration: we work in partnership and co-produce with systems, the NHS and other partners. We work in a joined-up way across our directorates and regions
• inclusion: we live our NHS People Promise and we role-model compassionate and inclusive behaviours, both internally and through our interactions with our partners
• learning and improvement: we are a learning organisation and by sharing our experiences we drive continuous improvement. We value expertise and take ownership and responsibility for our work. We focus on what we are uniquely placed to do and deliver on these commitments to the wider NHS

Our history

NHS England was originally established as part of the Health and Social Care Act 2012 and formally came into being in April 2013.

The NHS Commissioning Board (or NHS England as it came to be known) was set up to oversee the commissioning of NHS services by the newly formed clinical commissioning groups, as well as to directly commission specialist services on a regional or national level.

In 2018, NHS England and NHS Improvement began working more closely together and sharing posts and functions. NHS Improvement comprised Monitor (established in 2004 as the independent regulator of foundation trusts) and the NHS Trust Development Authority (established in 2013 to perform similar functions for NHS trusts).

In 2021, NHS England and NHS Improvement (NHSE/I) also absorbed some of the functions of former Public Health England – principally the organisation and oversight of screening services and wider healthcare contribution to public health. And in 2022, most of the functions of NHSX, which had been created in 2019 to lead digital transformation in health and social care, were transferred into NHSE/I.

A full merger between NHS England and NHS Improvement, under the name of NHS England, was confirmed by the Health and Care Act 2022, and took place on 1 July 2022.

This Act also provided government with the power to bring together more organisations to create a new NHS England with significantly wider responsibilities:

• NHS Digital (formally the Health and Social Care Information Centre) was the national provider of information, data and IT systems for commissioners, analysts and clinicians in health and social care in England. NHS Digital legally merged with NHS England in February 2023.
• Health Education England was created to provide national leadership and co-ordination of education and training for the health and public health workforce. Its duties included making sure there was an effective system for the planning and delivery of health education and training and enough skilled healthcare workers for the NHS. Health Education England and NHS England legally merged in April 2023.

As part of the creation of the new streamlined NHS England, our shared/overall headcount reduced by over 35% and provided nearly £500 million of savings to support frontline services.