Primary care and the NHS are overwhelmed. Growing numbers of patients seek healthcare support every day. Currently English primary care delivers over 33 million appointments every month – that’s more than half the country accessing formal health care. We need to rethink our approach to healthcare.
Public health and other voices have long called for a culture change that shifts our focus to looking at upstream health care measures. These voices call for initiatives that aim to prevent and reduce disease, rather than treat it when it happens.
Yet we still medicalise a lot of this health promotion work. For example, we look to reduce the rate of heart disease by measuring more people’s blood pressure and using medication to treat them. We try to reduce cancer by screening people so that we can operate and treat them earlier.
But some of the most effective public health initiatives look further upstream – focusing on the lifestyle and societal factors that affect our long term health. Such ideas can sometimes be seen as ‘radical’ or even ‘old fashioned’ when we have a host of new technological disease solutions. But the growing burden of overmedicalisation is driving renewed interest in rebalancing health care using these wider approaches.
This is the focus for our new ENHANCE study. The Academy of Primary Care is a partner in this project led by Dr Sergi Costafreda Gonzalez at UCL. We are the key primary care partner with a role in advising and supporting the development of a new approach that offers something very different to both primary care patients and healthcare services/staff.