Response to the Major Conditions Strategy report

Responding to the government's Major Conditions Strategy report, Nuffield Trust Senior Policy Analyst Sally Gainsbury said:

“This paper sets out the government’s ambition to extend healthy life expectancy through improving health care and prevention around six major conditions which together drive most of the self-reported ill health and premature death in England. The government is right that to tackle these disease groups, the health and care system will need to shift more of its focus towards primary prevention, early diagnosis and symptom management.

“What’s less clear is how the government will support health and care systems to do this in the context of severe pressures on staff and other resources, as well as a political culture that tends to place far more focus on what happens inside hospitals than what happens in community health care services, GP practices and pharmacies.

“This initiative is both long overdue and its emphasis has shifted over time: the Major Conditions Strategy is being developed in place of a white paper on Health Inequalities originally promised over 18 months ago. While the strategy’s six major conditions are also those conditions which form the immediate drivers of health inequalities in England, a perennial problem in health care – as with other public services – is that those who need help the most are often the least likely to access it.

“There is a risk that without more explicit emphasis on how the MCS can be used to tackle health inequalities – for example through focusing resources on deprived areas and tailoring services to excluded groups – life expectancy for those already well off will continue to increase, but there will be little or no reduction in the 19-year gap found between the most and least deprived neighbourhoods in England.”