Planning community health infrastructure
with place-based evidence -
from CDCs to Neighbourhood Health Centres

When NHS England set out to locate 170 Community Diagnostic Centres across England, it faced a problem familiar to any organisation planning services at national scale: lots of variables, little shared data, and no single view of where provision, population need, and accessible estate all converged. It used Strata, which is powered by Parallel to solve it.

The geospatial mapping platform allowed NHS England and ICBs to overlay diagnostic unit locations against population access patterns, health inequalities, and estate suitability, testing options spatially before committing capital. NHS England said Strata has “significantly improved our understanding and decision making, informing next steps based on health inequalities and ensuring as many people as possible have equal access to high-quality diagnostic services.”

The CDC programme was not without its challenges. Workforce constraints meant some sites opened and continue to operate below capacity. Where the estate led the population analysis rather than following it, some sites drew activity from nearby services rather than generating genuinely additional capacity. These are lessons that transfer directly to the NHC programme.

The Government’s commitment to 250 Neighbourhood Health Centres by 2035 is a greater scale and broader service model than CDCs, with complex cross-sector ownership and currently less capital headroom. Claire Harrison, CEO of Parallel, the team behind Strata, set out why that foundation matters.

“The right place to start to ensure best value for money is the estate the public sector already has, its suitability, and whether it is in the right place for the populations you are trying to serve. That analysis shapes everything that comes after. It leads you to what can be repurposed, what can be consolidated, where genuine gaps remain that existing assets cannot fill.”

“Repurposing alone will not deliver 250 centres. The gaps that remain will require new estate, justified with the same rigour as repurposing decisions. But instead of new build, this could come from assets that sit outside of the NHS estate database.”

“The health on the high street concept is a good example of placing services in locations where people already go; retail units, civic buildings, repurposed commercial space, removing the need for a separate journey. For communities with poor car access or limited public transport, that distinction determines whether a service is genuinely accessible.”

Programmes like One Public Estate made similar considerations and demonstrated what becomes possible when public sector partners plan from a single, shared data view. In Hull and East Yorkshire, NHS, local government and blue light partners mapped over 2,000 facilities in Strata, creating a comprehensive cross-sector estate picture for the first time. From that foundation they identified seven new projects and £2.5m of potential asset release value. Gemma Aked, One Public Estate Manager at Hull City Council, described it as having “catalysed major service transformation for the region.”

Claire highlighted how that collaborative model is directly applicable to the NHC pipeline. “One Public Estate showed that when partners work from a single source of information, they see things they could not see in isolation. Assets one organisation considered surplus become opportunities for another. For the NHC programme, that shared picture, NHS and local authority estate alongside broader public sector assets, is what allows planners to identify the full range of options before committing to new build.”

ICBs are now working through NHC returns, the initial assessments of population need, estate options, and service configuration that will determine which proposals move forward. The business cases that follow will need to demonstrate that the right services are going to the right places for the right populations.

Strata is NHS England’s commissioned estates planning platform, the same tool that underpinned the CDC programme. It brings together population need, disease prevalence, estate utilisation, deprivation mapping and travel-time modelling across NHS and local authority boundaries in a single, reliable view.

To understand how Strata supports your NHC work, contact help@stratasoftware.net

Read more about Strata’s work with health organisations:

Updated Community Diagnostic Centre datasets now available within Strata

Mapping ideal locations for CDCs

What is the ICS Strategy Atlas?

Strata helps Norfolk & Waveney ICS plan ahead