FPH President welcomes NHS long-term plan

The Faculty of Public Health (FPH) has welcomed the new NHS Long-Term Plan, which has a focus on prevention throughout and is expected to increase investment in out-of-hospital care.

In response to the long-term plan, Professor John Middleton, President, Faculty of Public Health, said: “We’re delighted to see prevention and early-intervention feature so strongly throughout the NHS long-term plan, alongside commitments to tackle health inequalities and shift NHS organisations towards a population health focus. Investing in NHS prevention interventions, such as Alcohol Care Teams, that we already know work if implemented well will keep our communities healthier, reduce pressure on acute services, and contribute to the long-term sustainability of all of our public services.

“At FPH, we have long recognised the vital work that NHS staff and organisations do in delivering the wider prevention agenda alongside all of their other priorities. That’s why we’re undergoing a programme of work in collaboration with health care leaders and FPH members to identify how we can implement prevention more effectively across the NHS. We hope to gain a better understanding of the barriers and enablers to ‘good’ prevention activity across primary, community, and acute settings and clarify where NHS organisations can add the most value to system-wide prevention activity as it implements the proposals published today.

“The long term plan is right to stress that the NHS alone cannot deliver prevention and reduce health inequalities; we all have a role to play. In particular, local authorities have enormous potential to improve the public’s health in concert with the NHS, but to do that they require dedicated funding that can be spent in a way that will best meet local needs and challenges. At the moment, our members leading local government public health teams are telling us that they don’t have enough resources to deliver all that is being asked of them.

“So while we welcome the prevention commitments made today in the NHS long-term plan, we’re also calling on the government to invest in a £1-2 billion per year Prevention Transformation Fund in this year’s Spending Review. The Fund would give a much-needed boost to local authority budgets, and would support the upgrading of prevention in local communities across the country.”

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Notes to editors

Click here to read and download the NHS long-term plan in full.

About the UK Faculty of Public Health

FPH is a membership organisation for 4,000 public health professionals from across the UK and around the world, and is a registered charity. Our role is to improve the health and wellbeing of local communities and national populations. We support the training of public health professionals and campaign to improve health policy in partnership with local and national governments.

For further information, please contact:

Haidee O’Donnell
Senior media & comms officer
Tel: 020 3696 1478
Email: haideeodonnell@fph.org.uk