New ‘major conditions strategy’ critical to levelling up healthy life expectancy, says health secretary, Mr Barclay, the UK health secretary, in a statement to the parliament, has said that the government will set out a new strategy to tackle six main health conditions which are burdening England’s healthcare system. These six conditions are: cancer, cardiovascular diseases, respiratory diseases, dementia, mental ill health and musculoskeletal disease. He believes that focussing on these 6 conditions will help deliver the governments manifesto in increasing life expectancy by five years by 2035. He didn’t delve into too much detail on how exactly this would be achieved but said it would focus on patients with multiple long term conditions, providing them with a ‘whole-person care’ approach and upskilling the NHS workforce on generalist medical skills.
He believes that by focusing on ‘good health’ and ‘early intervention’ this will reduce the pressures on the healthcare system when patients become far more ill.
This ‘Major Conditions Strategy’, and the upcoming ‘NHS Long Term Workforce Plan’, will ‘work together to set out the standards patient should expect in the short term and over a five-year timeframe’, he added. For this strategy to be successful, all health care services, local governments and NHS bodies will need to work collaborately more than ever before. Another focus has to be the more deprived areas and patients who on average have a 19 year shorter life expectancy than those with good health.
Plans and statements have now been made by the health secretary however the jury is still out on whether these will come to fruition baring in mind the governments long-awaited white paper on health disparities is yet to be published since last year.