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Dear Community health leader,
There's a strange irony at the heart of community health services in England.
Community providers deliver care to millions of people every year, in their homes, in clinics, in settings most of the public never see. They coordinate complex caseloads across nursing teams, urgent response units, diagnostics and specialist services. They are the connective tissue of the NHS in the community.
And yet, leaders in this sector are some of the most isolated in the system.
If you run a GP practice, you have your Local Medical Committee. You have RCGP conferences. You have Best practice. You have GPonline, Pulse, dozens of WhatsApp groups, and a well-established set of peer networks stretching back decades. If you run a community pharmacy, you have the PSNC, the NPA, Pharmacy Magazine, and a calendar full of trade events.
If you lead a community health provider, where is your support community? A regional forum here, an inconsistent mailing list there. No single place where the people come together to learn and discuss the hardest operational decision in the NHS community health sector.
As a provider new to this space, this didn’t feel right. Today we are launching something to fix this.
Common Place is a new professional network, curated by Suvera, for senior leaders in community health services — CEOs, COOs, CFOs, CMOs, CIOs and the director level roles that keep community services running.
The name is deliberate. "Common Place" is a shared space that should exist for community health leaders, but doesn't. It draws on the tradition of the "commonplace book”, a place where thinkers collected and connected ideas. And it carries a quiet aspiration that community care should be commonplace in our health system, but too often remains fragmented and overlooked.
Common Place is not a webinar series dressed up as a community. It is not a vendor user group. It is a genuine professional network, built around the principle that community health leaders deserve the same quality of peer connection and learning that exists in every other part of the NHS.
The pressures on community services have never been greater. Demand is rising. Workforce constraints are tightening. Commissioners expect more for less, and yet the National shift from hospital to community-based care, promises to enable a new era of care in the community.
In this environment, operating in isolation is not just lonely, it's strategically unhelpful. The community providers that will thrive over the next five years will be the ones that learn fastest, try new things, make tough decisions, reflect and share their learnings, while remaining relevant and effective!
But those conversations aren't happening. Where is the neutral ground where a CEO of an independent community provider can sit across from an NHS Trust community services director and exchange hard-won lessons about workforce planning, contract bidding, or technology adoption.
That's the gap ‘Common Place’ exists to fill.
You've probably been invited to dozens of "networks" and "communities" that turned out to be soulless and full of adverting and marketing. We understand the scepticism. Here's how Common Place is built differently:
It's for senior leaders only. This isn't a community for everyone in the sector. Common Place is specifically for the people making strategic and operational decisions in community health. The conversations are shaped by and for people who carry real accountability.
It's built around genuine value exchange. We will strive to curate monthly expert-led sessions on the issues that actually keep community leaders up at night. We're bringing in NHS leaders, academics, and successful provider CEOs into one space to elevate the entire sector.
It leads with peer connection, not product pitches. Common Place is curated and sponsored by Suvera, but it exists to serve its members. We believe that if we build something genuinely valuable for community health leaders, the commercial relationships will follow naturally. We're not interested in building something people tolerate — we want to build something people look forward to give their time and energy towards.
It starts exclusive and invite-only. We're launching an open call for 30 senior leaders starting today to join. Growth will be managed to protect the quality of the network. This is not about collecting email addresses, it's about building a room where every person in it makes the conversation better.
Personally speaking, Suvera has been working in a community since its inception. We founded the business to leverage technology and create services close to home that would help patients manage and improve their lives living with long-term conditions. All of our services operate in the comfort of patients' homes using technology.
We want to see more models like Suvera exist in the world and one way of doing this is to create a community of providers who work in community health to make this happen, to learn from each other and accelerate this model across the nation.
Lastly, this year, we have started using our in-house technology to power community providers across the country. Selfishly therefore we would like to curate a place whether we can discuss the challenges but also the opportunity for technology to be more and go further to enhance care in the community so we can build it for us all.
In the first six months, Common Place members will have access to a monthly programme of expert webinars and facilitated discussions on topics chosen by the community, including the future of community services under the NHS 10 year Plan, operational benchmarking, technology adoption, and contract strategy. Members will then receive curated thought leadership and white papers on community provider challenges. Everything will start virtual until we gather momentum.
As the network matures, we'll introduce intimate in-person roundtables and working dinners throughout England, and eventually a dedicated online space for ongoing peer exchange.
We're now accepting expressions of interest for the founding cohort of Common Place, from which the first set of members will be approved into the community.
If this resonates with you — or if you know a community health leader who should be part of this — please get in touch directly at ivan@suvera.co.uk.
There is no cost to join. There is no obligation. Just a genuine desire to help build the professional community that community health leaders have needed for a long time.
Community care should be commonplace. Let's start by giving its leaders a place to make this true!
Ivan Beckley is the Co-founder and CEO of Suvera, a healthcare technology company that provides AI-powered proactive care services and technology to NHS primary care and community providers.
