On 3rd July 2025, the Government published its new 10 Year Health Plan for the NHS. Informed by a consultation with the public and key stakeholders, this plan outlines how the Government plans to improve the NHS across England through three major shifts: from hospital to communities, from analogue to digital, and from sickness to prevention.

We welcome the focus on patient experience and outcome measures (PROMs and PREMs). The Cancer Patient Experience Survey has shown a worrying drop in trans people’s ratings of their cancer care. At OUTpatients, we have advocated for PROMs and PREMs to be used more often throughout cancer care so that we have more evidence of our community’s needs. We will amplify this message as the Health Plan is rolled out to ensure that information about sexual orientation and gender identity is included within these measures, and hope that this will lead to a clearer view on how to improve the lives of LGBTIQ+ people affected by cancer. 

Neighbourhood health services could help more people access care closer to home, but each service needs to have an LGBTIQ+ informed approach. Moving towards a community based approach requires more than just a change of location. To be truly effective, these services must understand the needs of all the community members they serve, and we will continue to call for mandatory training across cancer services as the Government moves forwards. We will be working hard to develop and share our resources, training, and best practice recommendations, helping to prepare both health care professionals (HCPs) and third sector organisations to provide inclusive care for our community.  

We support the improvement of NHS digital systems to make health records easier to access and manage. As part of this digital shift, we want to see collaboration with LGBTIQ+ communities to create safe and trusted ways of recording our data. Information about sexual orientation, gender identity, and sex within the patient record should be stored and shared in a way that maintains the dignity, privacy, and safety of our community.These new systems should be co-designed with LGBTIQ+ people to ensure effective data collection while maintaining community trust. We will also advocate for barriers to screening to be addressed as part of this process.

We recognise the benefits of AI in certain areas, but have reservations about its potential for bias. We know that AI models can be influenced by social inequalities and biases, including in clinical decision-making. Safety measures will therefore need to be put in place to make sure that AI systems used by the NHS do not worsen health inequalities by repeating existing barriers. There is also a lack of data across different areas of cancer diagnosis, treatment, and wider care for LGBTIQ+ people, so we have concern that the nuances of our community’s needs could be overlooked by AI systems. It is therefore important that the use of AI is implemented with a close eye on patient safety and security for minoritised communities. 

We were disappointed to find no mention of our LGBTIQ+ community. We were pleased to see other underserved communities named in the Health Plan’s discussion of health inequalities, but are surprised to see it fall short of mentioning our own, despite the systemic barriers we continue to face. Over the past eight months, the OUTpatients team have attended several meetings with the Department for Health and Social Care (DHSC) alongside other organisations focusing on health inequities to ensure that the needs of our community were heard. We hope that this oversight will not be replicated in the upcoming National Cancer Plan, and will continue to push for the naming of our community in national plans, policies, and strategies. If our community is not made a priority on paper, then we cannot be made a priority in practice.  

Now that the plan is published, the real work begins. Many of the proposed updates do have the potential to improve the health sector, especially for underserved communities like ours. But unless we are given a meaningful seat at the table as these reforms are rolled out, we risk baking the same biases and inequalities into the new system that we are trying to tackle in our current one. 

We therefore strongly encourage HCPs, decision-makers, and allies across the health sector to keep engaging with our community to enable LGBTIQ+ people to access equitable care. If you would like to hear our thoughts on the 10 Year Health Plan in more detail, please get in touch.