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Blog
Moving from Population Insight into Neighbourhood Action
Jul 04, 2025
Many of you will be familiar with the ‘Shifting Left’ narrative; which aims to keep people living longer in better health whilst having fewer contact with the care system. At this year’s NHS Confed Expo, the famous Desmond Tutu quote below was used frequently throughout the two days in Manchester. However, if health and social care needs to do more on that horizontal, right to left, axis, it also needs to do more on a vertical axis; the need to move from a population health view of the nation down to delivery of change in neighbourhoods.
“We need to stop just pulling people out of the river. We need to go upstream and find out why they’re falling in.” – Desmond Tutu
Population health analysts do a fantastic job in profiling neighbourhoods. In our care systems, we have a good understanding of the health and social challenges we face, not just by analysing the way we use the NHS but also by considering education, employment, housing, and many other factors. With this information you can decide how to effect change in communities and neighbourhoods – where it really impacts people’s lives.
The analysis we have is beneficial for service design and macro-economic modelling, but how does it help us design interventions that impact individuals and address their challenges? We know that people with multiple co-morbidities utilise NHS services, and we suspect that the key to mitigating this demand and improving their lives lies not in the NHS, but further afield. So, we need to move to a more precise version of population health analytics, which is clearer on the drivers of challenge in people, communities, neighbourhoods, and places and can enable us to see the levers we can pull, as integrated teams, to address this need.
We are making progress.
People are curating their own records in personal health apps, as well as the NHS App. Genomics data is increasing in volume, so we can understand the challenges we are born with, as is microbiome and other data that helps us understand how to modify our lifestyles and reverse the risks to our well-being. Many of us are part of the phenomenon of the ‘Quantified Self’, where we record our lives and explore ways to improve them.
Hey Wikipedia! What is the Quantified Self?
Quantified self is both the cultural phenomenon of self-tracking with technology and a community of users and makers of self-tracking tools who share an interest in "self-knowledge through numbers". Quantified self practices overlap with the practice of lifelogging and other trends that incorporate technology and data acquisition into daily life, often with the goal of improving physical, mental, and emotional performance. The widespread adoption in recent years of wearable fitness and sleep trackers such as the Fitbit or the Apple Watch,[2] combined with the increased presence of Internet of things in healthcare and in exercise equipment, have made self-tracking accessible to a large segment of the population.
Yet there are barriers to sharing this data.
For example, I can share data with my extended personal network more easily than I can share my data with the teams managing my care in different organisations, due to the way we govern information across public service. This needs to change. Safely, ethically, in a trustworthy way and within legal frameworks – butsolving our care issues depends on giving service providers better access to relevant data about those in their care.
This brings us to the Federated Data Platform (FDP), which presents a huge opportunity to deliver precision population health at scale and in a safe way – where the data needed to plan services is distilled into the data needed to change and save lives. In our panel session at NHS Confed Expo it was great to hear about the advances being made in this area. The FDP team led a great discussion about the future of the platform as an enabler of the transformation of services in neighbourhoods. t’s promising that the precision population health platform we’ve been waiting for is taking shape.
Finally, there is the reality of life in neighbourhoods. Change happens in communities and is driven by people, supported by technology, but not because of technology. It was brilliant to hear how my own Trust, Northern Lincolnshire and Goole NHS Foundation Trust (NLAG), are leading the charge to use the FDP to improve the way services interface – for example to support the discharge of patients in a way that make both clinical and experiential sense.
What do I mean by experiential? Too often we fail to address the challenges health and care staff face in the support of the most basic needs of patients, such as the need to be discharged in a timely manner post-surgery. We talk frequently about delayed discharges, challenges in receiving the right medication, issues with social care packages and facilities and it's clear these issues affect both overwhelmed staff and stressed patients.
We analyse the data and generate performance metrics that help us to understand some aspects of the problem but are we really addressing the point? The point is that precision public health is a vital cog in enabling staff to have a better experience of work and provide better support to their patients. The barriers to this experience often lie outside the NHS’s control—and unless we equip the right people with better data, too many will continue to slip through the cracks and fall into dangerous rivers.
Panel Discussion: Shifting Left: Using digital to reshape the health system at NHS Confed Expo 2025
From Left to Right: Rosalind Way, Director, National NHS Engagement IQVIA, Andy Haywood, Group Chief Digital Officer, NHS Humber Health Partnership, Rebecca Llewellyn, Director of Data Management and Transformation, NHS, and Paul Henderson, Consulting Director, Healthcare, IQVIA.
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