Supporting the NHS 10 Year Health Plan and Neighbourhood Health Centre (NHCs) directive
How Matrix Booking enables the future of integrated, community-based care
The NHS 10 Year Health Plan is shifting more care into communities through Neighbourhood Health Centres (NHCs), bringing different services and organisations together into one building. While this model offers clear benefits, it also creates operational challenges around managing shared spaces and resources. Matrix Booking has long supported NHS organisations in addressing these challenges across shared estates.
What NHCs need to operate
Under NHS England’s Directive, NHCs bring GPs, district nurses, social workers, mental health teams, and voluntary sector partners under one roof. In practice, that means a genuinely mixed building. A consulting space next to a training room, next to a hot desk area, next to a drop-in point, all being used by staff from different organisations who have never shared a system before.
Anyone who has managed a shared estate knows what happens without the right technology to support it. Spaces get double-booked, rooms sit empty while people hunt for somewhere to work, and managing bookings quickly becomes a headache.
Putting the right tool in place to help people book spaces isn’t a nice-to-have: it’s what makes the whole setup work.
Proven experience across NHS Estates
Matrix Booking is used day to day by NHS trusts, integrated care boards (ICBs), and community health providers across the country, for example:
- Solent NHS Trust have deployed it across 12 sites.
- Devon Partnership NHS Trust use it to support their clinical hubs programme.
- NHS Kent and Medway brought it in after merging seven Clinical commissioning groups (CCGs) into a single organisation and consolidating their estate.
Access controls need to be tight. Audit trails matter. The data generated by the system also has to be robust enough to support investment decisions and help estates teams explain where buildings are and aren’t being used efficiently.
Built for shared buildings
Multi-tenanted buildings are where Matrix Booking has always done its best work. The platform has been running across public sector hubs for years, including the Government Property Agency (GPA) government hubs, alongside government offices and mixed-use community venues. These are environments where several organisations share space but still need to operate separately and keep their data separate.
In practice, this means:
- Each organisation gets its own booking policies and access rules, all sitting within the same system.
- Staff only see what’s relevant to them, while estates managers get a full picture across the whole estate.
- Cross-organisational resource sharing lets ICB and Trust staff book each other’s space without separate logins or systems.
- Utilisation reports provide the evidence base for decisions about space, whether that’s releasing it, repurposing it, or making the case for more.
Supporting integrated care
The plan identifies three areas for NHS improvement. Matrix Booking addresses all of them:
- Productivity – Less time spent chasing rooms and managing spreadsheets means more time supporting the community. Estates teams get reliable data rather than relying on what people think is happening.
- Integration – A shared booking platform is one of the practical things that makes multi-organisation work feel joined up rather than just co-located. It also makes collaboration between organisations sharing the same space much easier.
- Prevention – NHCs only work as an early intervention model if staff can easily access the spaces they need. As more services share environments, a clear and coordinated approach to booking resources becomes essential.
Ready now
As NHCs move from an NHS England directive into operational reality, the infrastructure needed to run them needs to be in place from the start. Matrix Booking is quick to set up and has a proven track record of adoption in NHS environments.
Head of Sales, Matrix Booking
Matt has spent a good portion of his career working with NHS organisations on workspace and estates challenges, and has spoken at NHS Smart Estates conferences on where technology fits into that picture. If you’re thinking through what the NHCs directive means for your estate, he’s well placed to discuss the operational and estate implications.
Explore how else Matrix Booking can help you
Employees can search for desks in any of your buildings or shared hubs, find colleagues, make bookings for their team, and more.
People can find rooms that meet their needs, including location, facilities, capacity, and accessibility. Add equipment, catering, and other essentials.
Efficiently manage visitor sign in systems across your sites, ensuring a secure welcome and clear communication of health and safety procedures.
Powerful reports help you keep track of occupancy levels, usage trends, and more, so that you can continually optimise your estates.
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