Hospital to community
Neighbourhood health services, care as locally as possible — and the bed that cannot be freed.
What the Plan commits to
- A Neighbourhood Health Service, with neighbourhood health centres bringing services together closer to home.
- Care delivered as locally as clinically appropriate, shifting activity out of acute settings.
- Better integration between NHS and social care so discharge is not the bottleneck it currently is.
- Expanded community diagnostics and same-day services.
The modelling question
This shift fails or succeeds on discharge. Matching patients who no longer meet the criteria to reside against scarce community and social-care capacity, over a rolling horizon, under an equity constraint, is a constrained assignment problem — and assignment problems have a clean QUBO form.
Instruments that plausibly apply
Evidence already on this site
discharge-flow QUBO, stated explicitly and benchmarked against the exact optimum
Read →cross-platform validation hierarchy — the reliability floor any operational claim would need
Read →The gap
The binding constraint on discharge is social-care capacity, not solver speed. A better optimiser allocates a shortage more fairly; it does not create a care package. Say that first, then do the maths.
Sources
- Fit for the Future: 10 Year Health Plan for England (DHSC, July 2025)
- Neighbourhood Health Guidelines 2025/26 (NHS England)