Caitlin Tilley | 1st July 2026
Penny Dash told the Company Chemists’ Association conference yesterday that a “finger in the air” estimate suggested the health service was sitting on roughly double the primary care estate it required.
She said NHSE was reviewing how space is used, including working with integrated care boards to map available capacity across primary care, community services, and local authority buildings.
Dr Dash added that much of the existing GP estate was both in “poor condition” and “poorly utilised”, noting that GP premises were often not used fully for significant parts of the day.
She said practices were often not fully utilised during the middle of the day, “because increasingly GPs are doing a very good job of doing triage [earlier in the morning], they’re doing a lot of work by speaking to people over the phone, and so we’ve got fewer and fewer people actually coming in for an in-person consultation”. Clinicians were also often out making home visits from about 11.30am-3pm, she added.
Speaking in April, the former ICB chair and McKinsey consultant stated that mental health trusts were sitting on land worth £3bn, which she argued threw doubt on claims the sector is underfunded.
Yesterday, she also highlighted variation in access and performance, suggesting only a minority of patients experience consistently high-quality, responsive care.
Dr Dash said only “about 30 per cent of our population is served by GPs delivering absolutely outstanding care”, which is “very digitalised, fully online, highly responsive, absolutely getting an appointment”.
“There’s some outstanding stuff happening, but we do struggle to replicate it,” she said.
The NHSE chair also criticised the rollout of community diagnostic centres, the majority of which, she said, were “woefully underutilised” and “fragmented”.
She said “it would have been better” to co-locate the new diagnostic services with GPs, pharmacists, and other multidisciplinary staff “so that everyone could work together and could actually use those facilities in a more efficient way”.
The CDC programme was launched in 2021, under the previous government, and has seen about 170 centres opened across England. A further 36 new and expanded sites are in development.
Dr Dash said: “The overwhelming majority of our [CDCs] are woefully underutilised… They’re nice buildings and new buildings, they’ve got brand new state-of-the-art scanners in, and they’re woefully underutilised…
“They’re fragmented, they’re separated from our GPs and our multidisciplinary teams.”
She suggested CDCs could evolve into neighbourhood health centres and host GP practices.
Dr Dash also mentioned the development of NHS Online – a digital-only provider offering remote specialist treatment to patients referred by their GP.
She said: “If that is successful, or even parallel to that, we could be looking at similar things for other aspects of care.” She said most community pharmacy dispensing would soon be done remotely.