Health and Social Care Secretary launches ‘Prevention’ vision

The Secretary of State for Health, Matt Hancock, has published a vision for how he plans to transform the Government’s approach to prevention, paving the way for a Green Paper in 2019.

The document, ‘Prevention is better than cure’, builds on the Government’s previous work in areas such as childhood obesity and social prescribing. It shifts the focus to primary and community care services and the value they can bring in offering early support.

These plans include:

• consulting next year on measures to encourage employers to support more disabled people into work, and to improve access to occupational health;
• increasing specialist mental health services to a further 30,000 women during pregnancy and during the first year after they have given birth, by 2020-21;
• halving childhood obesity by 2030;
• reducing loneliness and social isolation, and making social prescribing available in every local area by 2023;
• diagnosing 75% of cancers at stages 1 and 2 by 2028; and
• sequencing 5 million genomes in five years, and offering whole-genome sequencing to all seriously ill children and those with cancer by 2019, as well as adults with rare diseases or cancers.

Read more: www.gov.uk