NHS England recorded a sharp increase in demand for trusted information on cardiovascular health, with the number of people searching for NHS advice on high blood pressure surging in 2025 and generating hundreds of thousands of extra visits to online guidance on risks and checks. The NHS webpage on high blood pressure rocketed from 30th place in 2024, to the second most visited health condition on NHS.uk, reflecting rising public concern about hypertension and interest in preventive care. Alongside this, tens of thousands of people living with vitiligo affecting their face are to be offered the first approved medicine on the NHS to restore lost skin colour, as a new cream treatment known as ruxolitinib is rolled out to nearly 100,000 people aged 12 and over.
Screening and early diagnosis programmes also showed significant gains. New figures show that in 2024/25, 1.94 million women aged 50 to 70 attended screening within six months of invitation, up nearly 200,000 (193,745) from 1.75 million the previous year, leading to hundreds of thousands more women attending NHS breast screening and thousands more cancers being diagnosed early in England. To improve cancer outcomes further, patients facing suspected lung cancer could get answers sooner under a new NHS pilot using artificial intelligence and robotic technology to help doctors reach hard-to-detect cancers earlier with fewer invasive tests. The new approach uses artificial intelligence software to rapidly analyse lung scans and flag small lumps that are most likely to be cancerous, and a robotic camera is then used to support earlier and more targeted investigation. In bowel cancer, NHS England announced plans to lower the threshold for a home-screening kit to trigger urgent cancer testing from next month, with thousands of cases of bowel cancer expected to be diagnosed earlier or even prevented.
Mental health and operational performance are also central to current efforts. Millions of adults facing debilitating anxiety conditions are missing out on treatment that could help them recover, and new analysis of NHS data shows that over 670,000 people were treated with NHS talking therapy care last year as part of a major campaign to reach millions more. Thousands of people living with schizophrenia and severe depression are being recruited for a major new study that will analyse DNA alongside detailed questionnaires to unlock a new era of personalised treatment for severe mental illness. Operationally, the NHS delivered a historic high of 18.4 million treatments and operations in 2025, up from 18 million in 2024, cutting the waiting list to 7.29 million, its lowest level since February 2023. Winter pressures remain intense, with figures showing the average number of patients in hospital with norovirus each day this week rose to over 1,000 for the first time this winter (1,012), and separate data indicating 420,324 ambulance handovers with known times in January, a 5.2% increase compared to 399,415 in January last year, even as ambulances handed over patients more than 2 minutes faster and unloaded patients three minutes faster in the latest weekly snapshot.
