The move to prevention

For the UK's National Health Service (NHS) the pandemic has highlighted the urgency to promote prevention and early detection. BC the NHS faced massive increases in the number of people who will need treatment and care for preventable conditions—and great increases in demand for social care. The NHS spends many millions trying to keep people alive in hospitals for a few weeks at the end of their lives; yet it spends less than 5% of its budget^[8] to prevent or arrest those diseases and impairments that degrade people's lives for many years.

Prevention is a central focus of the work I have co-led with Lord Geoffrey Filkin CBE for the All Party Parliamentary Group for Longevity (APPGL), and recently published in our report, The Health of the Nation: A Strategy for Healthier Longer Lives.

The NHS is one of the most efficient health systems in the world and delivers more activity per unit of funding than many other similar systems. However...