The NHS 10 Year Health Plan, launched in 2025, is a blueprint for a radically different healthcare system and a window of opportunity for MedTech companies. As the NHS shifts its focus from hospitals to communities and from analogue to digital, the question isn’t if technologies will be adopted, but which will be understood, trusted, and embraced. This is where healthcare PR and marketing come in. In a landscape defined by transformation, strategic messaging and communications is essential.
From hospital to community: A new frontier for MedTech
One of the most ambitious goals of the NHS 10 Year Health Plan is to decentralise care. The creation of Neighbourhood Health Centres (NHCs) aims to bring diagnostics, mental health services, and social care closer to where people live. This shift is designed to reduce pressure on hospitals, improve access, and support earlier interventions.
This opens the door to MedTech innovations in the field of portable diagnostic tools, remote patient monitoring systems, and AI-driven triage platforms to be deployed into homes, GP practices, and community hubs.
The NHS is notoriously challenging to penetrate at scale for innovators, and this decentralised model could prove to be even more complex. Community care involves a broader range of stakeholders, including local authorities, primary care networks, social workers, and patients themselves. Each has different needs, expectations, and levels of digital literacy.
The challenge for MedTech companies isn’t just technical, it’s relational. How do you build trust across such a diverse ecosystem? How do you demonstrate value in settings that are less structured than hospitals? And how do you ensure your solution fits with each community’s specific needs?
From analogue to digital: A mission to free up NHS staff
The second major shift is digital transformation. The NHS App is being positioned as the “digital front door” to healthcare, offering patients access to records, appointments, prescriptions, and even AI-powered symptom checkers. Virtual wards are expanding, electronic patient records are being standardised, and digital diagnostics are becoming mainstream.
This is a huge win for MedTech companies working in AI, data analytics, and remote patient care. The NHS is now proactively looking for digital tools to reduce the burden of admin tasks and enable NHS teams to work smarter.
But with opportunity comes competition. The digital health space is crowded, and NHS buyers are under pressure to make decisions that are both cost-effective and clinically sound. Technologies that don’t clearly align with NHS priorities, or that fail to communicate their value, risk being overlooked.
Why communications will make or break MedTech adoption
1. From product marketing to purpose-led comms
Standing out in a digital-first NHS requires more than innovation. It requires clarity, relevance, and resonance. Communications are a strategic lever in this new NHS landscape. Here’s why:
MedTech companies often focus on features: faster diagnostics, smarter algorithms, better data. But NHS decision-makers are looking for purpose. They want to know how a technology solves systemic problems like reducing hospital admissions, improving equity, or enabling earlier intervention. This means crafting narratives that speak to outcomes, not just outputs, and showing how a tool fits into the NHS’s broader goals, not just how it works.
2. Building trust throughout the entire care system
As care moves into communities, the number of stakeholders grows. GPs, nurses, carers, patients, and local commissioners all play a role in adoption. Each group has different priorities, ranging from clinical efficacy and ease of use to cost and privacy. PR and marketing messaging needs to be tailored to each audience, anticipating concerns before they become barriers to adoption.
3. Balancing speed vs. sensitivity
The NHS is moving fast, but adoption is often slow. MedTech companies must navigate a tension between urgency and sensitivity. Push too hard, and you risk alienating clinicians. Move too slowly, and you miss the window. Communications must balance momentum with empathy. This means understanding the pressures NHS staff face, and positioning your technology as a partner, not a disruptor.
MedTech innovation needs to engage on a human level
The NHS 10 Year Health Plan is a call to action for MedTech companies. It offers a clear direction toward community-based, digitally-enabled care, but the path forward remains complex. To succeed, MedTech innovators must not only build great products, but also connect with their audiences through impactful, benefit-led narratives.
Healthcare PR, marketing, and communications specialists are the experts who turn innovation into adoption. They help technologies find their place in a complex care system. They build trust, shape perception, and drive momentum.
In the coming years, the MedTech companies that thrive will be those that develop the best algorithms or devices, while understanding the NHS journey and knowing how to speak its language.
Find out more about how SAY helps MedTech and Health Tech companies communicate the benefits of their diagnostics, devices and digital solutions to decision makers and end users.
Photo by Marek Levak on Unsplash
