One of the big-ticket items announced alongside the 2026 King’s Speech was the proposed NHS Modernisation Bill.
The King’s Speech is the formal announcement of the government’s legislative programme, and the NHS Modernisation Bill is one of the bills announced within that.
The speech from King Charles said that the government needs to “push forward with significant reforms to the NHS”.
The Bill is one of the steps towards reform. One of the headline concepts of this bill is the “Single Patient Record” (SPR).
The idea is to create a single, centralised patient record across the NHS, which would join up health and social care data. This would then be accessible via the NHS App.
Health Secretary, Wes Streeting, calls the concept a “gamechanger”, and Mark Hutchinson, Executive VP at Altera Digital Health (UK & EMEA), said that it could "transform both decision-making and patient experience".
In the current set-up, NHS records are highly siloed, meaning that clinicians often cannot see essential information, as it is held elsewhere.
Unsurprisingly, therefore, many organisations, such as The King’s Fund and the Patients Association, have welcomed this proposal.
In a statement, the Chief Executive of the Patients Association, Rachel Power, emphasised that far too many people have had the experience of repeating their history at every appointment, or of vital information simply not being there when it is needed.
Sarah Woolnough, Chief Executive of The King's Fund, even said that this change was the part of the Bill that offered the greatest opportunity for improved patient experience in healthcare.
This is about reducing the administrative burden that is eroding the clinical workforce
What are the risks?
Linking primary and secondary care, as well as social care, would remove the core issue behind these patient journey issues.
To enact this, the bill establishes measures like mandatory data-sharing between NHS organisations, using the NHS App as the patient-facing access point, as well as phased rollouts with pilot pathways.
But there are hurdles to this. The concept only succeeds if trust in data usage is treated as the critical path.
Dr Harry Thirkettle, Director of Health and Innovation, Aire Logic, explained that “patients need clear control over how their data is used, clinicians must be involved in shaping the system, and there has to be a firm line between direct care and secondary use, backed by transparent oversight.
“Get the safeguards right, and it will save lives. Get them wrong, and joined-up care could be set back a decade.”
It is not clear yet what body would be the formal national data controller, and this is a key part of the puzzle.
What are the rewards?
Dr Paul Deffley, Chief Medical Officer/UK Managing Director at healthtech company Alcidion, weighed in on the announcement, calling it a “big ambition”, but adding that the benefits in practice are actually being “dramatically undersold”.
“This is about reducing the administrative burden that is eroding the clinical workforce, enabling faster and safer decisions at the point of care, supporting population health management at scale and ultimately making AI deployable in real clinical settings rather than confined to pilots.”
Chief Executive of the Patients Association, Rachel Power, emphasised that far too many people have had the experience of repeating their history at every appointment, or of vital information simply not being there when it is needed.
Practical route to a SPR rollout
The Bill suggests starting the rollout with maternity and frailty care.
The government’s explanation for starting the Single Patient Record (SPR) with maternity and frailty care is that those are areas where fragmented records are especially risky and where patients often move between multiple services.
There are many records of where this migration of patients’ data causes issues.
As such, Thirkettle believes that starting with areas like maternity and frailty is the right approach.
He says that in this way they can ”prove the value, build confidence, and scale carefully”.
Policy commentators such as The King's Fund and Nuffield Trust also noted that phased implementation is politically and technically safer because a nationwide unified record system is extremely complex.
Starting with narrower pathways reduces rollout risk, limits early data-sharing scope, and allows testing governance and consent models to be real-world tested before wider expansion.
The problem of fragmentation that won’t go away
Deffley said that what this debate must not overlook is the fragmentation that already exists within acute trusts themselves.
Clinicians routinely have to access data distributed across multiple disconnected systems to assemble a picture of a patient that should be immediately visible.
“This intra-trust fragmentation is a prerequisite problem: until it is solved, trusts will struggle to share a consolidated view of the patient,” Deffley said.
Mark Hutchinson, Executive VP at Altera Digital Health (UK & EMEA), also raised the issue of interoperability, highlighting that it is key to "delivering this vision"