NHS England is rolling out a national neighbourhood health index to support ICBs and local neighbourhood teams to better understand how well integrated care is working for their local populations.
The index will run as part of the National Neighbourhood Health Implementation Programme launched in July 2025 to support the development of neighbourhood health services across communities.
The Index will measure the extent to which local health and care partners are providing joined-up, personalised, and proactive care and will enable teams to track and measure progress on health and care outcomes over time.
A Neighbourhood Health survey will be rolled out within the 43 Places identified as part of the NNHIP programme. The survey sample will cover adults identified nationally using the Hospital Frailty Risk Score (HFRS) as at intermediate and high risk of frailty. The HFRS is a clinically validated scoring method that can identify cohorts with long term conditions (LTCs), rising risk of complex health and care needs, adverse health outcomes and avoidable hospital admissions.
The sample will also include those identified by GP Practices, through Primary care data, as a local priority cohort of individuals with long-term conditions and high or rising risk of hospital admission.
This cohort often require the support of a wide range of services, including GP practices, community services, health and wellbeing teams, voluntary sector organisations and social care teams.
The survey will focus on areas such as understanding an individuals current health and wellbeing, their confidence and ability to manage their own health, the extent to which services are effectively co-ordinated and joined up and how an individual’s health could be improved.
Survey respondents will consent to their survey data being linked to their health record and other data sets enabling patient experience to be triangulated with service utilisation and outcome data. This linked data can help inform future planning and service design across ICBs and within neighborhoods as well as supporting national benchmarking and identification of unwarranted variation.
Delivering the Neighbourhood Health Survey
The Neighbourhood Health Survey is currently conducted by Ipsos UK who act as a data processor on behalf of NHS England .
NHS England and Ipsos have obtained section 251 approval (of the NHS Act 2006 and Health Service (Control of Patient Information) Regulations 2002 (CAG reference: 25/CAG/0008)) for the survey. This provides a legal basis for patient information to be used to carry out the survey.
However, potential survey participants will have the opportunity to opt-out of the survey prior to their personal details being passed to Ipsos UK. A dissent poster has been created to provide details for potential survey participants as to how they can opt-out.
A downloadable version of the dissent poster for GP Practices to print and post within their practices can be found here. We are asking all GP Practices within the 43 Places covered by the NNHIP programme to put this poster up within their practice for potential survey participants to view.
Contact us
If you have any questions or require further information about the Neighbourhood Health Index please contact: england.ices@nhs.net.
