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Health secretary Steve Barclay sets out plan to tackle six ‘major conditions’

Health secretary Steve Barclay sets out plan to tackle six ‘major conditions’
Steve Barclay, health and social care secretary. Credit: Parliament, Creative Commons.

The Government is to set out a strategy to tackle six major conditions contributing to England’s ‘burden of disease’, the health secretary Steve Barclay has announced.

In a statement to Parliament, Mr Barclay listed these major conditions as cancers; cardiovascular diseases, including stroke and diabetes; chronic respiratory diseases; dementia; mental ill health; and musculoskeletal disorders.

‘Tackling’ these conditions is ‘critical’ to achieving the Government’s manifesto commitment of gaining five extra years of healthy life expectancy by 2035, and its ‘levelling up’ mission to narrow the gap in healthy life expectancy by 2030.

‘This work combines our key commitments in mental health, cancer, dementia and health disparities into a single, powerful strategy’, said the health secretary.

Steve Barclay’s brief announcement set out that the forthcoming strategy would aim towards patients with multiple long-term conditions receiving ‘whole-person’ care, with a greater focus on ‘generalist medical skills’ in the NHS workforce.

He said: ‘Our workforce model needs to adapt, reflecting that the NHS is caring for patients with increasingly complex needs and with multiple long-term conditions. We need greater emphasis on generalist medical skills to complement existing deep specialist expertise in the NHS, supporting clinical professionals to heal with whole-person care.’

By shifting the focus to ‘good health’ and ‘early intervention’, this will ‘reduce demand downstream on health and care services’, Mr Barclay pledged.

This ‘Major Conditions Strategy’, and the upcoming ‘NHS Long Term Workforce Plan’, will ‘work together to set out the standards patient should expect in the short term and over a five-year timeframe’, he added.

The plans will see health and care services, local Government and NHS bodies will be required to ‘work ever more closely together’ in order for the people of England to live ‘healthy, fulfilled, independent and longer lives’.

Steve Barclay noted that people living in England’s most deprived places ‘live, on average, 19 fewer years in good health than those in the least deprived places’.

Therefore, the strategy will set out interventions that the Government can make to ensure that ICSs and the organisations within them maximise the opportunities to tackle clusters of disadvantage in their local areas where they exist, he said.

This ‘will include addressing unwarranted variation in outcomes and the care people receive in the context of the recovery from the pandemic’, and be informed by the ongoing review into ICSs led by former health secretary Patricia Hewitt.

However, the health secretary’s announcement comes as he has yet to publish the Government’s long-awaited white paper on health disparities, produced last year. The RCGP and BMA were among 155 organisations to urge the Government to recommit to publishing the white paper in October last year.

A version of this article first appeared in Pulse

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