These are the next major health conditions we’ll be worrying about

Heart disease, stroke and road injuries will no longer pose the greatest threats to our health in the future – is the NHS ready to face these new challenges? Asks Ian Hamilton

‘More men and women will experience a reduced quality of life as a result of their consumption of alcohol and other drugs’ (PA)

As a population our health needs change over time – what threatened us a century ago doesn’t pose the same threat today. Understanding our collective health needs post-pandemic is critical to planning a health care system that is able to respond to these new threats to our health.

A fascinating new study makes some scientific predictions about what those major threats to our health beyond Covid-19 will be. Instead of ischemic heart disease, stroke and road injuries, the most common problems will be alcohol-related cirrhosis, drug use disorders and diabetes. This means more men and women will experience a reduced quality of life as a result of their consumption of alcohol and other drugs. So, while overall life expectancy has increased, a greater proportion of the population will experience poor health as they age. They may not die prematurely but their quality of life will be severely impaired.

Understanding this major shift in the burden of disease has clear implications for the NHS and social care. The current configuration of services, and the way they are delivered, is based on health problems that will diminish. Some of the problems that will instead dominate in the future have been fuelled by the pandemic. For example, those who were already drinking excessively prior to the pandemic further increased their consumption during the Covid crisis. We are not in a good place with specialist support services as they are severely underfunded. Services struggle to meet the current rise in demand, let alone the surge in coming years, suggested by this research.

As we’ve witnessed with shortages of nurses and doctors during the pandemic, it takes years to train these professionals. These aren’t simply workforce taps that can be turned on and off as demand peaks and troughs. Any rational government would use the intelligence provided by this new research to plan accordingly, ensuring the workforce was trained and ready to meet the projected demand. Alas, as with the dysfunctional and unjust funding model of social care for older people, the right noises will be made but no action will follow.

Even if policymakers don’t care about the people who will be affected by the increase in these health problems, there is a sound economic case to be made for planning ahead and investing in health and social care infrastructure now. It is always more costly to react to these problems as opposed to planning and preventing them.

The government has already made clear its view of this group, effectively writing them off as an ageing cohort of drug users, with the inevitable physical problems blamed on the “choices” they made. In other words, their lifestyle choice and consequences are their problems. Abhorrent as this is, it’s still a widely held and popular view among voters, who don’t want their hard-earned taxes being redirected to people who they see as having brought problems on themselves.

However, as the proportion of the population experiencing these problems grows, so too do the number of families, relatives, friends and colleagues who will see first-hand how cruel and punitive this attitude is. Nothing is more potent in converting firmly held views than personal experience.

There is a desperate need to reorientate our approach to health. Given that we now know what lies ahead in terms of the future burden of disease, it seems obvious that we should intervene today to minimise the impact of these problems. Sadly, like our government, we are all collectively in a state of denial. So, we will wait for these issues to mushroom before being forced to invest our money and empathy in providing the care our fellow citizens deserve.