Prevention is better than cure if we want to save the NHS

We need to stop complaining about the end results and concentrate on tackling the root causes

(Getty Images)

I don’t need to tell you that these are challenging times for the NHS. It’s been a battleground of this election campaign, with promises and accusations being thrown around with abandon.

One figure has kept cropping up again and again: £8 billion. That’s the amount NHS England’s boss Simon Stevens has said we’ll need by 2020 to plug the hole in the health service’s budget. Assuming, that is, that another £22 billion can be found in ‘efficiency savings’. Not a sum you find down the back of the sofa.

It doesn’t take a genius to work out why the NHS’s costs are skyrocketing: we’re not looking after ourselves, we're becoming more sedentary and getting old.

Despite the obsession with the size of our waists and whether or not we are ‘beach body ready’, it is physical inactivity which is set to tip the NHS budget overboard.

Almost 30 per cent of adults in England are physically inactive (UK figures are similar), meaning they don’t achieve 30 minutes of exercise per week. We are the lazy man of Europe, with almost double the inactivity levels of France and Germany.

The consequences of this are serious. Being inactive leads to an increased risk of over 20 chronic conditions from diabetes to cancers. For people with a disability, inactivity can be the difference between a healthy, independent and sociable life or a life of dependency and despair.

And the total cost to the NHS, other public services and wider economy from this rising tide of inactivity is estimated at up to £20bn per year.

At the same time, life expectancy just keeps rising. Research published recently in the Lancet shows that by 2030 average longevity will be 85.7 years for men and 87.6 years for women – although there will still be a disgracefully large gap between the richest and poorest areas.

Adult social care is projected to cost local authorities almost 40 per cent of their budgets, starving them from being able to invest in services such as parks or leisure centres to help people live a healthy and active later life.

As a result, more people will be living longer in poor health. And that is what is pushing up costs for the NHS and social care so rapidly.

What can be done?

As a former athlete and Paralympian I’m pretty keen on fitness. And I was recently appointed as the new chair of ukactive, which campaigns for physical activity to be at the heart of public health policy.

Across the board, I think we need to get much more preventative when it comes to public health. Why wait to give a person expensive gastric band surgery, insulin or radiotherapy when you could have nipped the problem in the bud years earlier at a fraction of the cost? We need to stop complaining about the end results and concentrate on tackling the root causes.

So the next government needs to step up to the plate to start making it easier for us a society to get more active, more often.

For a start, I’d like to see a cross-government strategy for tackling physical inactivity. Despite it being a huge cause of premature death, there has never been a coherent strategy for tackling inactivity. That’s pretty shocking when you think of the numerous successful long-term strategies that have dealt with smoking or alcohol.

Backed up by local action, this could spark a whole host of new measures. For example, why not put staff from the physical activity sector (gyms, trainers, community exercise programmes and so on) on a par with frontline healthcare workers - recognising that they’re performing a key task in preventing ill-health throughout society? Or make physical activity a recommended intervention that GPs routinely suggest to patients with long-term conditions? Or mandating that schools make provision for one hour of activity in every school day, be that in structured PE lessons or simply through play?

There’s so much more we could and should be doing to address this elephant in the room. If we don’t want the NHS to sink under the pressures, we’ve got to get serious about getting active.