Healthcare construction is facing considerable challenges in 2026, not least the delays to the New Hospital Programme and the substantial backlog for existing, ageing facilities.
With keeping critical healthcare environments operational essential, reducing project disruption and wasted administrative time must be a priority.
Payapps’ Anthony Puma examines the disruptive challenges facing contractors and subcontractors working in the healthcare construction sector and highlights how fragmented manual payment processes add unnecessary burden.
Based on current disruptions in healthcare construction, it is important to consider the uses of technology, such as automated application for payment software, to minis this.
The NHS is quite rightly revered across the world as the gold standard of accessible healthcare. However, severe capital funding constraints and outdated infrastructure and technology are providing significant hurdles for this widely-heralded institution. This is perfectly illustrated by the substantial delays to the government’s New Hospital Programme (NHP). Launched in 2020 to ‘address the deteriorating state of NHS hospitals in England’, the NHP planned to deliver 40 new hospitals by
2030. However, various planning gaps and uncertainty led to a 2025 reset of the scheme, seeing the target amended to 46 new hospitals by 2040.
The NHS also has a huge backlog of critical infrastructure repairs, with the British Medical Association (BMA) revealing health spending growth has been below average since 2010, resulting in a cumulative underspend of hundreds of billions of pounds.
The major challenge of fragmented systems
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