Better Health For All

I’m excited to be writing my first blog for FPH. Please be gentle with me!

We’ve just posted our new Prevention Transformation Fund discussion paper on our website.

The discussion paper is the result of a lot of consultation with public health experts over the past nine months.

We’ve talked with our members, most of whom are public health professionals doing brilliant work to improve the health and wellbeing of their local community and prevent a worsening in health inequalities.

But we’ve also sought out the views of partner organisations, health think tanks and those in statutory bodies to find out what they think the public health community needs most to undertake the ‘radical upgrade’ in prevention that has been talked about for many years but, so far, hasn’t materialised.

The main challenge we’ve encountered in developing FPH’s Prevention Transformation Fund policy idea is whether a transformation fund is really needed at all. A minority have argued that we should simply be making the argument for reversing the public health funding cuts faced by public health teams across the UK.

We recognise a number of very well-respected public health organisations and charities will likely make this argument during the forthcoming spending review consultation process.

It is a very finely balanced discussion but our view – based on all the conversations we’ve had so far – is that a temporary (five-year), targeted injection of funding, principally to support innovative projects or interventions we know work and that need upscaling quickly, is what local public health teams need most right now.

This temporary injection of funding will give time for other measures, notably a ramping up of prevention activity through the forthcoming NHS 10-year plan, to be realised.

It will also give further time for a ‘health in all policies’ approach within local councils to blossom. And it would allow for any change in the ring-fenced public health grant approach to bed in.

But what do you think?

What is without doubt is that local public health teams across the UK cannot take more cuts without it having a very serious and negative impact on the future health and wellbeing of local communities, on NHS and social care services, and on our economy.

And this impact would be felt at a unique moment in our country’s history when we really really need the UK population to be ‘match-fit’ for Brexit.

While many in the public health community are – perhaps understandably – pessimistic about our chances of securing new funding next year, we are approaching the spending review with both the Prime Minister and the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care having publicly stated that prevention must be one of a small number of key priorities.

This may indicate that making a compelling case to the Treasury for ‘how’ to inject new prevention funds into local communities and being able to convincingly model how this will lead to a respectable and timely return on that investment, may be more important than making the case (again) for ‘why’ we should invest more in prevention services. Although it is worth stressing that both the case for ‘how’ and ‘why’ need to be made clearly and convincingly.

As the name suggests, we’re hoping our discussion paper will encourage more conversations across our membership and with the public health and wider health communities.

You can read the full discussion paper, written by Senior Policy Officer, Lisa Plotkin, here. Please do let us know what you think.

And if you’re an FPH member and want to play a bigger role in our Public Health Funding Campaign, please consider joining our membership ‘sounding board’.

Let us know what you think about our discussion paper and find out more about how to join our campaign ‘sounding board’ via policy@fph.org.uk

Written by Gus Baldwin, director of policy & communications at FPH. You can follow Gus on Twitter @Gus_Baldwin.