The demand on public sector services being generated by poor health in Lancashire is “not sustainable” unless action is taken to reduce the number of people falling ill in the first place.
That was the warning from Lancashire County Council’s director of public health as he set out plans for the authority to develop an illness prevention strategy.
Dr. Sakthi Karunanithi told a recent meeting of County Hall’s health and adult services scrutiny committee that the plan – which is currently in the early stages of development – will seek to make ill health prevention a responsibility of the county council as a whole and the wider public sector, rather than just the public health department he leads.
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That ambition will require a “partnership” with society, in which individuals are also supported to make “healthy choices” in relation to the likes of smoking, alcohol consumption, their weight and levels of physical activity.
He said the strategy would also depend on national government helping to set “better conditions for health”, including “better homes, good jobs and …so many other environmental [and] economic factors”.
“It is very obvious that the current state of demand and the needs that we are seeing are not sustainable if we don’t really dial up on the way we act with the communities to prevent issues from escalating,” Dr. Karunanithi said.
“Improving our health is greater than improving the NHS. Health is made in our homes and our neighbourhoods more than it’s made in our hospitals and GP surgeries.”
The meeting heard that prevention takes three forms – stopping sickness from developing at the outset, monitoring risk factors when they do arise – and intervening when necessary – and treating problems once they are present in order to prevent them deteriorating.
Committee member Mark Jewell said he was “really excited” by the strategy’s potential, but queried the degree to which it would depend on having the cash to fund it.
“[Is it] going to be [that] we have ‘X’ funding and therefore we have to shape something around [that amount] – or is it that actually we can create…a model that says, ‘With this intervention you get these benefits [and] therefore it makes sense to do [that, because it will be self-funding]?’” County Cllr Jewell asked.
Dr. Karunanithi said that while availability of funding at the county council level might be the “starting point”, the aim was to seek co-investment from other public and private sector partners, including “social entrepreneurs”.
“Certainly the ambition for preventing unnecessary suffering is not constrained by funding…but the actions will need to be mobilised across the society, including [with] members of the community [playing] their part as well,” he added.
The strategy will be developed in three phases – focussing first on the county council, before the plan is developed further and ultimately embedded across the health and social care system.
“Shorter-term opportunities to improve impact” will be fed into the budget-setting process for 2026/27, the committee was told.
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