To Save The NHS, We Must All Take Greater Responsibility For Our Own Health
Prevention rather than cure is particularly potent as a mantra in rural areas where sparsity exacerbates the effectiveness of acute services. This article therefore has strong resonances with “rural”. It tells us, using some interesting stats along the way:
According to Baroness Tanni Grey-Thompson, society today is less active than ever before. Meanwhile, demands on our health service have reached unprecedented levels. This is not a coincidence.
Our living and working environments have been stripped of movement, with drastic consequences. Technology has taken us from hunter-gatherers to smartphone takeaway swipers, offering easy calories with none of the requisite exertion to maintain a healthy weight.
As with any complex issue, turning the tide on our country’s inactivity epidemic requires a range of innovative solutions and collaborative efforts.
The need for concerted action is pressing. Physical inactivity causes twice as many deaths as obesity and costs the UK economy an estimated £20billion each year. Living a sedentary lifestyle significantly increases risk of up to 20 conditions including heart disease, type-2 diabetes, cancers and mental health problems.
For the NHS, tasked with finding billions in efficiency savings by 2020, around 70% of its budget is currently consumed by the treatment of long-term conditions such as the above.
Put simply, if we want the NHS to survive and indeed thrive, we need a radical shift towards prevention over cure. Our focus must switch from waiting to treat illness to proactively promoting wellness.