The National Health Service’s multibillion-pound London property portfolio is to be restructured after the capital’s strategic health authority published proposals to build up to 150 ‘super-surgeries’ or ‘polyclinics’ over the next decade. Financial Times

The proposals would reshape the NHS estate, which includes 93 hospital sites, more than 1,400 mental health and community facilities and almost 1,600 GP practices that collectively are worth many tens of billions of pounds.

The polyclinics would provide family doctor services, pharmacy, dentistry and social and mental health, along with much more local on-the-spot diagnostics.

They would provide hospital services such as X-rays, ultrasound and blood tests, pathology, minor surgery and low-level urgent care. By 2017, they will account for about half the outpatient appointments that currently take place in hospital.

’The day of the district general hospital seeking to provide all services to a high enough standard are over,’ said Sir Ara Darzi, professor of surgery at Imperial College London, who wrote the report and has since become a junior health minister in charge of a year-long review of NHS services.