We are delighted to share the Children’s Hospital Alliance (CHA) report, prepared for our 2025 Annual Conference ‘Innovating to Reform Paediatric Care’.
We held our conference in the same financial year as a new Government was voted in on an election manifesto that included a promise to raise ‘the healthiest generation of children ever’. This delivered a landmark independent investigation highlighting ‘concerns about the NHS’s capacity and capability to deliver high quality care for children’ (Darzi, 2024) and which saw the launch of a national conversation on a new NHS Ten-Year Health Plan billed as the ‘largest public consultation on healthcare in the history of the NHS’.
The report provides an important contribution to these essential debates, because it contains a set of priorities that come directly from children and young people across nine of our 14 member trusts. It highlights what is important to them – what do they want to keep and protect about the NHS? What would they like to change? How can we support them and their families?
This feedback comes from a group of young people who rely (or have relied on) on NHS services and who stand to be most affected by any changes set out in the NHS Ten-Year Health Plan. For them, this is not a political exercise – it is an opportunity to change their lives, the lives of the people who care for them and those of other children and young people like them across the country – for the better.