Health on the High Street: How Regeneration and Agile Procurement are Enabling New Models of Community Care

The Rise of Health on the High Street

What began as a series of pilot initiatives has quickly developed into a recognisable model of place-based healthcare. Community Diagnostic Centres (CDCs) have played a particular visible role in this shift. By early 2025, more than 160 CDCs were operating across England in locations raging from shopping centres to sports stadiums, collectively having delivered 14.7 million tests since 2021. These facilities are designed to make diagnostic services easier to access outside of acute hospital settings. Locating services within town centres or retail environments can significantly reduce travel times for patients, while easing pressure on hospital estates and supporting the wider shift toward neighbourhood-based care.

Early evidence suggests that bringing services closer to communities can also transform patient pathways. At the Oldham CDC, for example, lung cancer diagnosis times have been reduced from 42 days to 18.8 days, enabling the service to meet the Faster Diagnosis Standard for the first time. Outcomes such as these demonstrate how relocating diagnostic services closer to communities can accelerate access to testing and treatment. More broadly, the concept of health on the high street is increasingly being recognised as a practical response to both healthcare and regeneration challenges. Vacant retail units can be repurposed to deliver accessible clinical services while also introducing stable daily activity into town centres that have experienced significant retail decline. In this way, healthcare facilities are beginning to play a new role within the urban landscape, not only as places of care, but also as anchor institutions that support the wider vitality of town centres.

Repurposing the Built Environment

One of the reasons high street healthcare projects are gaining traction is that many retail buildings are already well suited to clinical conversion. Former retail premises often provide generous floorplates with high ceilings and ground-floor access – all characteristics that can support diagnostic suites, outpatient clinics and flexible clinical layouts. In many cases, adapting an existing building can be faster and less disruptive than delivering new construction elsewhere. Planning policy has also evolved to support this shift. Changes to the planning use class system, particularly the introduction of Use Class E, now allow many retail spaces to be converted to healthcare use without requiring full planning permission. This flexibility has significantly simplified the early stages of project development and made it easier for public sector organisations to consider vacant high street units as viable locations for healthcare services.

Beyond practicality, repurposing existing assets also aligns with wider sustainability goals. Retaining and adapting buildings avoids much of the embodied carbon associated with demolition and new construction, while town centre locations are often well connected by public transport and within walking distance for many patients. Former retail spaces can therefore offer more than simply available square footage. When thoughtfully adapted, they allow healthcare services to be delivered within environments that are already embedded in local communities. Across the UK, a growing number of projects are demonstrating how vacant retail spaces can be successfully repurposed to support accessible healthcare services while contributing to town centre regeneration:

Table 1: Selected UK case studies demonstrating health-led high street regeneration.

These projects demonstrate how healthcare services can become powerful anchors within town centres. Unlike traditional retail, health facilities generate consistent daily footfall, bringing patients, staff and visitors into areas that may otherwise struggle to maintain activity. This combination of social benefit and economic activity is increasingly positioning healthcare as an important component of town centre regeneration strategies.

Why Procurement Speed Matters

While the physical conversion of retail space into healthcare environments can be technically complex, one of the most significant barriers to delivery often sits earlier in the process: procurement. Identifying a suitable building is only the beginning. Projects typically require the rapid appointment of architects, engineers, project managers and other specialist advisors before design and construction can begin. Traditional procurement routes for professional services can take three to six months before these teams are formally appointed. For organisations attempting to respond quickly to regeneration opportunities or vacant property availability, these timelines can become a critical constraint.

Framework approaches have increasingly emerged as a way to address this challenge, by enabling organisations to access pre-approved expertise more quickly while maintaining compliance with procurement regulations. One example is the NEPRO Three framework, created by the North East Procurement Organisation (NEPO) and delivered in partnership with Bloom Procurement Services as a neutral vendor. The framework provides public sector organisations with access to a large network of pre-accredited professional service providers across a wide range of disciplines. Through mechanisms such as direct award or mini-competition, professional services contracts can be awarded in a matter of weeks rather than months. Since 2012, the framework has supported the delivery of over 11,000 projects, delivering average savings of around 14% against budget.

The speed achieved through frameworks does not come from reducing scrutiny, but from completing many of the assurance and compliance checks earlier in the process. Suppliers are already accredited and capability-checked, while Bloom supports the development of specifications, evaluation and supplier selection. For organisations seeking to convert vacant retail space into healthcare environments, this can allow clinical planning and design development to progress more quickly, while supporting timely coordination of subsequent construction procurement activities. In the context of high street healthcare projects, this ability to mobilise expertise quickly can be the difference between identifying an opportunity and successfully delivering it.

What Enables Successful Delivery

Experience from projects delivered through the NEPRO Three framework highlights several factors that consistently influence successful outcomes.

–Early alignment between partners: The most successful projects tend to be those where local authorities, NHS organisations and property owners share a clear vision before procurement begins. Where this alignment is established early, projects are far more likely to progress smoothly and avoid delays caused by competing priorities or unclear ownership.

–The quality of the project brief: In a neutral vendor model, the clarity of the specification plays a major role in ensuring the right expertise is matched to the project. Investing time early to define clinical adjacencies, operational flows and delivery priorities can prevent significant delays and redesign later in the process.

–Embedding social value expectations from the start: When commitments around local employment, apprenticeships or environmental performance are integrated into procurement criteria from the beginning, suppliers are better able to design their proposals around those objectives. Rather than being added as an afterthought, social value becomes part of the delivery approach itself.

Taken together, these lessons highlight the importance of approaching high street healthcare projects not simply as individual building conversions, but as collaborative initiatives involving multiple public sector partners working toward shared outcomes.