While much attention has rightly focused on social care, particularly following the Prime Minister’s announcements and the forthcoming reforms expected from the Casey Commission, Cooper’s argument was that the future of healthcare starts much earlier. Maternity, child health, prevention and early intervention are increasingly central pillars of Labour’s health agenda.

The revival of the Sure Start model was repeatedly referenced, with plans to embed health services into a new network of family health centres. Alongside the return of national maternity standards, the new maternity and neonatal commissioner, and a renewed focus on addressing stark inequalities in maternal outcomes, the direction of travel is clear: improving lifelong health begins before birth and in the earliest years of life.

Beyond the main stage, fringe events explored what a genuine shift from hospital to community care could look like. Neighbourhood health teams, population health management and greater integration between health, housing and social care all featured heavily. Liverpool’s work using local data to identify and support people at risk of hospital admission was frequently cited as an example of prevention in action.

Women’s health was clearly a prominent theme throughout conference, with the focus ranging from maternal mental health and menopause support to endometriosis, menstrual health and tackling inequalities in care with an awareness of intersectionality. There was also growing recognition of the links between health and wider social issues, including domestic abuse, violence against women and girls, and neurodiversity.

The resounding message from conference was that Labour’s health vision extends beyond hospitals. The ambition is a system that intervenes earlier, supports people closer to home and places prevention at its heart.

Yet there is also a sense that many of these ambitions are not entirely new. Successive governments have spoken about prevention, community-based care and shifting activity out of hospitals. The challenge has rarely been identifying the right direction of travel – it has been delivering lasting change in a system under constant financial and workforce pressure, weary of structural reform and often characterised by deeply entrenched ways of working.

That raises some important questions. Will Labour’s emphasis on devolving power to neighbourhoods and local systems make transformation more achievable by enabling solutions tailored to local needs? Or, does greater local autonomy inevitably come with increased variation in services and outcomes across the country?

Perhaps most importantly, with ministers acutely aware of the electoral clock, what can government realistically achieve before the next general election that convinces the public healthcare is improving not just in strategy documents, but in their day-to-day experience of accessing care?

Conference provided a clearer picture of where Labour wants to take healthcare. The bigger test now is whether this vision can translate into visible change on the ground.