Convenzis NHTeams 2026 Highlights | Neighbourhood Health

We went into this event expecting to hear a lot about AI. To be fair, it was there. You can't spend a day at a healthcare conference in 2026 without somebody talking about AI, automation or digital transformation. What was surprising was how quickly those conversations moved on. 

Instead, almost every speaker landed in the same place. Neighbourhood health isn't being held back by a lack of technology but rather the much harder task of redesigning services around people instead of organisations - a theme that surfaced within minutes of the conference opening. 

Chair Dr Gurnak Singh Dosanjh, GP and Deputy Chief Clinical Information Officer at Leicester, Leicestershire and Rutland ICB, challenged delegates to stop thinking in terms of "my organisation" and start thinking as one team.  

With the World Cup underway, he likened the NHS to football fans arriving in their club shirts, each representing their own team. Delivering neighbourhood health, he argued, means “leaving those shirts at the door and pulling on the England shirt instead, working towards a shared goal rather than protecting individual organisations.”  

The analogy raised a few smiles around the room, but it neatly summed up the challenge facing the NHS. Patients don't experience care as a series of organisations, so why do we still design services that way? 

One of the standout sessions of the morning came from Tara Donnelly, former NHS Chief Digital Officer. She reflected on how quickly virtual wards have become part of everyday NHS care, with around 10,000 people now receiving hospital-level treatment from home each day. It was an impressive reminder of what's possible when innovation is backed by clinical leadership.  

Interestingly though, she spent very little time celebrating the technology itself. Instead, she focused on what comes next. According to Donnelly, around five per cent of the population accounts for more than half of NHS resource, yet these are often the patients receiving the most fragmented care. The opportunity isn't simply to treat those patients at home. It's to identify problems sooner, coordinate support earlier and prevent crises altogether.  

One line from her presentation stuck with us for the rest of the day. "The model part is much more complicated. The technology is the easy bit." With the sessions that followed, it turned out she wasn't the only person making that point. 

One thing that became increasingly obvious as the day unfolded was how often completely different sessions reached exactly the same conclusion. 

Dr Minal Bakhai MBE, Director for Primary Care and Community Transformation and the National Neighbourhood Health Implementation Programme at NHS England, approached neighbourhood health through prevention, community partnerships and population health. 

Her keynote highlighted how neighbourhood working is already reducing emergency admissions and emergency department attendances in parts of the country, while also making the case that improving health isn't the NHS's responsibility alone. Communities, local authorities and the voluntary sector all have an equally important role to play. 

A little later, Polly Shepperdson, Partnerships and Alliance Manager for First Databank, arrived at almost exactly the same place, but from a completely different direction. Her session focused on medicines optimisation, yet it quickly became about people rather than prescriptions.  

Instead of asking whether someone had taken their medication, she encouraged delegates to ask why they hadn't. Was it confusion? Isolation? A side effect? Or was the prescription simply revealing something much bigger happening in that person's life? 

Different topic. Same message. Neighbourhood care works best when we understand the person before we try to solve the problem. 

The afternoon sessions brought AI back into the conversation, particularly around triage, administration and managing growing demand. Organisations demonstrated how intelligent tools can reduce paperwork, improve access and help clinicians spend more time with patients rather than systems. What was refreshing here was that nobody claimed AI was the answer. 

Whether it was Jake Jefferies from Anima discussing intelligent demand management or Access’s own case study with Everyturn Mental Health demonstrating better joined-up care through shared information via the Hope Haven project - the technology always felt like the supporting act throughout these discussions.  

The real conversation remained firmly focused on collaboration, trust and helping professionals work together more effectively. That's probably why the conference never felt like another AI event, despite AI featuring throughout the programme.

By the end of the day, nobody was even thinking about software or even neighbourhood structures. Every speaker had added another piece to the puzzle, but none suggested the NHS is waiting for another digital breakthrough before neighbourhood health can succeed. The tools already exist, the evidence is growing, and the goal is a shared one for us all - the real challenge now is whether organisations are prepared to work differently. 

If NHTeams 2026 demonstrated anything, it's that the conversation has finally shifted. We're spending less time asking why neighbourhood health matters and far more time tackling the difficult question of how we make it work.  

After such an inspiring and insightful day, it gives us hope that we’re not too far away from the answers.