The Health Mission is a 10-year commitment by London’s public sector leaders to make London the healthiest global city. Its aim is to significantly close the gap in health inequalities by 2035, drawing on London’s strengths in innovation and digital transformation.
The Mission was set up in direct response to the NHS’s shift from analogue to digital, which holds real promise. However, without intervention, it risks leaving some Londoners behind and widening the health inequalities that already exist.
The Mission exists to close that gap.
Led by the Greater London Authority (GLA) and London Health and Care Partnership, it brings together the NHS, London Councils, the boroughs, voluntary and community sector (VCS) organisations and other partners.
Three workstreams
The Mission is made up of three workstreams:
- Data: Establishing a baseline of digital exclusion across London, so interventions can be targeted where they’re needed most.
- Community insights: Capturing the lived experiences of Londoners with different needs as they navigate an increasingly digitised health and care system.
- Theory of change, led by LOTI: Designing, and testing the interventions that can deliver the Mission’s vision.
Designing for a future we can’t yet see
Planning for 2035 with the tools, technology and problems of 2026 is not easy: anything we build solely around today’s constraints could be outdated long before it reaches scale.
That’s why we’re holding back from quick fixes and instead testing a set of “what if” scenarios about how care might work in a decade’s time, where appointments might be triaged by AI, pharmacies handling first-line mental health, and so on.
The point isn’t to guess correctly. It’s to take what’s emerging now and use it to picture plausible versions of the future, which is where the Royal College of Art (RCA) comes in: their speculative design approach is helping to build these scenarios from today’s social, economic, political and technological cues, mapped across the present, 2030 and 2035.
What’s next
This is only the start. Later this year we’ll bring it all together at an in-person event, where practitioners from across the public sector will spend a day exploring three immersive futures alongside academics and innovators — and leave with defined ideas to take forward.
