In this blog, Kirsty Blenkins, Evidence and Policy Lead and Deputy Chief Executive at the Association of Young People's Health (AYPH), writes about why the neighbourhood health agenda must be designed with young people in mind from the outset, rather than treating them as an afterthought to services built for younger children.
The neighbourhood health agenda represents one of the most significant shifts in NHS delivery in years, away from hospitals and into communities. At AYPH, we think the direction of travel is right. But we have a concern: young people aged 10 to 25 risk being bolted on to a model that was not designed with them in mind.
The Neighbourhood Health Framework (published March 2026) identifies Best Start Family Hubs as the primary vehicle for community-based health services, with an explicit focus on babies and children aged 0 to 5. That is welcome, but it tells you where the policy attention is focused. Children and young people are named as a high-priority cohort in the framework’s goals. The framework sets a target to reduce acute outpatient appointments for children under 16 by 10 per cent by March 2029 and commits to substantial progress on reducing community waits. Integrated neighbourhood teams (INTs) are expected to include a specific CYP strand, with every child who needs one having access to an INT by 2029. These are meaningful commitments. But for adolescents and young adults, the picture beyond these metrics is far less clear. Without deliberate design choices from the beginning, young people’s access to holistic, age-appropriate provision will not be there. This matters. The Milburn Review interim report, published in June 2026, found that nearly one million young people aged 16–24 are NEET, and that the proportion with a mental health condition has more than doubled since 2012. Effective neighbourhood health provision for young people must be part of the answer.
The workforce is a critical piece
Ambitions on neighbourhood health will be undeliverable without the right professionals in the right roles. Those professionals need to be confident working specifically with young people. GPs, community nurses, health visitors, and neighbourhood health team members increasingly encounter adolescents and young adults. Still, training in adolescent development, young-person-centred communication, and the distinct health needs of this age group is, at best, inconsistent.
This is why AYPH has developed Youth Health Essentials, an online one-hour CPD course co-developed and delivered with young people and built for time-poor professionals across health, commissioning, public health and education. Young people's health and the quality of their care often depend on whether professionals feel confident navigating communication, trust, adolescent development and the transition to adult services. Youth Health Essentials is designed to make that capability easier to build, grounded in evidence, policy awareness and young people's own experience of what works.
As neighbourhood health teams take shape locally, building this competence into the workforce from the outset is not a nice-to-have. It is a prerequisite for the model to actually reach young people.
What good looks like
Young people are consistent about what they need from health services: services that don't require a crisis as the entry point; referral routes that don't rely on a GP as the only gateway; and staff who understand adolescent development. This is well evidenced, including through AYPH's own work with young people, and reflected in the You're Welcome quality standards, which set out the core standards for health services to be accessible and acceptable to young people aged 10 to 25 (Office for Health Improvement and Disparities, 2023). Integrated neighbourhood teams can offer this, but only where referral routes are genuinely accessible to young people, and where the team includes people with specific skills in working with this age group.
As ICBs develop their local neighbourhood health models, we urge them to ask: where are the 10–25-year-olds in this plan? Not as a subcategory of families but as a population with distinct health needs, a distinct relationship with services, and a right to shape how those services are designed. Neighbourhood health can work for young people. But it has to be built for them.
AYPH's Youth Health Essentials youth-led training can support more joined-up practice across public health, children’s services, and wider partnerships working with 10-25-year-olds. Explore the training hub and get in touch with AYPH [email protected]
Establishing youth-friendly health and care services (Office for Health Improvement and Disparities, 2023)