By Lucy Phillips
4 May 2010
Public health programmes are likely to be an easy target for NHS spending cuts, with new screening and vaccination programmes particularly vulnerable, professional leaders have warned.
Frank Atherton, president of the Association of Directors of Public Health, told Public Finance that public health programmes tended to be scaled back in times of financial difficulty in the NHS. ‘It’s often easier to cut public health expenditure because it’s not tied into contracts in the same way that secondary and GP care are,’ he said.
Atherton said he ‘suspected’ that public health budgets, which are used to tackle problems such as smoking, binge-drinking and obesity, were already starting to be cut, but so far there wasn’t a national picture. ‘We need to watch the situation quite carefully and keep an eye on it. History is against us,’ he said.
The health service is expected to achieve up to £20bn in efficiency savings by 2014 but Atherton warned that ‘not investing in prevention now essentially increases the cost to the NHS in the future’.
Criteria for new health screening and vaccination programmes would be tightened and ‘new programmes are much less likely in the future’, he claimed. ‘They are expensive and we don’t have the resources.’ But he said it was unlikely that any existing, well established programmes, such as breast and cervical cancer screening, would be dropped.
Atherton predicted a move towards less expensive public health measures, such as introducing a minimum price for alcohol.
Julian Le Grand, professor of social policy at the London School of Economics, agreed that there would be a shift away from costly screening and vaccination programmes. But while funding pressures were a factor, there was also much more policy interest in helping to change people’s behaviour to boost health, such as banning smoking in public places, he said. ‘[This] is politically controversial but doesn’t have the same economic public spending costs as other [programmes] and the general feeling is that these work.’
He added: ‘I don’t see an enormous draw towards more and more programmes like screening because of the costs and because of the shift in interest.’
The Department of Health guidelines on the 30% cuts to management costs that NHS bodies are being asked to make did not include public health consultants and health promotion staff. Atherton welcomed this, adding: ‘It’s good news that there is a decision in the system to protect the workforce that delivers long-term health gains.’
4 May 2010
Public health programmes are likely to be an easy target for NHS spending cuts, with new screening and vaccination programmes particularly vulnerable, professional leaders have warned.
Frank Atherton, president of the Association of Directors of Public Health, told Public Finance that public health programmes tended to be scaled back in times of financial difficulty in the NHS. ‘It’s often easier to cut public health expenditure because it’s not tied into contracts in the same way that secondary and GP care are,’ he said.
Atherton said he ‘suspected’ that public health budgets, which are used to tackle problems such as smoking, binge-drinking and obesity, were already starting to be cut, but so far there wasn’t a national picture. ‘We need to watch the situation quite carefully and keep an eye on it. History is against us,’ he said.
The health service is expected to achieve up to £20bn in efficiency savings by 2014 but Atherton warned that ‘not investing in prevention now essentially increases the cost to the NHS in the future’.
Criteria for new health screening and vaccination programmes would be tightened and ‘new programmes are much less likely in the future’, he claimed. ‘They are expensive and we don’t have the resources.’ But he said it was unlikely that any existing, well established programmes, such as breast and cervical cancer screening, would be dropped.
Atherton predicted a move towards less expensive public health measures, such as introducing a minimum price for alcohol.
Julian Le Grand, professor of social policy at the London School of Economics, agreed that there would be a shift away from costly screening and vaccination programmes. But while funding pressures were a factor, there was also much more policy interest in helping to change people’s behaviour to boost health, such as banning smoking in public places, he said. ‘[This] is politically controversial but doesn’t have the same economic public spending costs as other [programmes] and the general feeling is that these work.’
He added: ‘I don’t see an enormous draw towards more and more programmes like screening because of the costs and because of the shift in interest.’
The Department of Health guidelines on the 30% cuts to management costs that NHS bodies are being asked to make did not include public health consultants and health promotion staff. Atherton welcomed this, adding: ‘It’s good news that there is a decision in the system to protect the workforce that delivers long-term health gains.’
