Helen Salisbury: Preventing ill health requires investment
Last week the Public Accounts Committee produced an excoriating report on the financial sustainability of the NHS in England.1 It criticised the Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC) and NHS England for their complacency, lack of ideas, failures in financial planning, and wildly optimistic assumptions about productivity. The stated ambition of these bodies is to improve the nation’s health through three major shifts: from hospital to community, from analogue to digital, and from treatment to prevention—but how these changes will happen has yet to be elaborated. The shift from treatment to prevention is arguably hampered by the DHSC’s …
