Better Health For All

Today we’ve published the results of an opinion poll of over 300 NHS leaders about prevention. We commissioned this research as part of FPH’s larger project examining the role of the NHS in ill-health prevention.

With this poll we wanted to explore with an NHS audience several of the key issues that have emerged from our project’s extended consultation so far with predominantly a specialist public health audience. We were interested to see if the opinions, perceptions, and priorities of these two (sometimes overlapping, but often distinct) groups diverged or were in general alignment.

We explored the following six main issues:

1. Do NHS leaders consider prevention to be part of their job, e.g. is it a core, large, or small part of their departmental work?
2. Prevention priorities now and for the future – which approaches to prevention delivery (e.g. addressing common risk factors or targeting specific populations) is their local NHS currently prioritising and which approaches do they think their local NHS should be prioritising?
3. The effectiveness of NHS prevention activity – how effective or ineffective do they think their local NHS is at delivering its current prevention priorities?
4. Prevention budgets – on average, what percentage of their budget do they currently spend on prevention and what percentage do they think they should be spending? Do they think the NHS should reallocate its budget away from treatment and towards prevention?
5. The top barriers to NHS prevention activity – what is getting in the way of their department doing more or more effective prevention?
6. NHS advocacy for prevention – which taxes and regulatory measures do NHS leaders think would most benefit the health of their local population?

You can learn all of the answers to these questions and with some very brief analysis in our short summary paper here.

We think these results provide a useful (and much needed) benchmark for the current state of what the NHS does, spends, values, prioritises, and would like to do more of (or better of) when it comes to prevention. We also think they can help our members and others working on the frontline of healthcare delivery ‘do’ more prevention. Additionally, we also think they can inform the ongoing debate around the implementation of the prevention aspirations laid out in the NHS Long Term Plan.

But we’d really like to know what you think.

Please do take 10 minutes and have a read-through and then let us know what you make of our findings by emailing policy@fph.org.uk or tweeting us @FPH using #NHSprevention

Thank you so much in advance for taking the time to read and share.

Lisa Plotkin
FPH Senior Policy Officer