The NHS 10-year plan is an opportunity to transform our nation’s health and wealth

A week prior to the release of the NHS 10-year health plan, Geeta set out her vision for reform:

The creation of a national health innovation service...

"Reform needs to be far-reaching and requires a new mindset. We are currently losing staff with innovative minds and skills because bureaucracy and time constraints stifle new ideas.

We need a national health innovation service – an arm of the NHS where employees can take new ideas rather than going through their line managers and never hearing back. The NHS must be a temple not just for the delivery of healthcare services but for innovation."

The importance of communicating the why, not just the how...

"The golden thread is the impact that ill-health has on the economy; it holds back growth. Research recently conducted by the Create Health Foundation, which I founded, revealed that one in seven women have been forced to quit a job because of a health condition."

Moving from treatment to prevention...

"Reforming the NHS is not an end in itself; it is an essential pre-condition for improving our living standards and enhancing family life. We will only achieve this if we focus our efforts on health activation, improvement and education as the three pillars for prevention."

"The government has announced a £50 million investment to facilitate the delivery of 270 million messages through the (NHS) app this year, an increase of 70 million compared to the previous financial year and this is welcome news, but it should do more to educate patients about their conditions, providing targeted, reliable and timely information."

"NICE also has a bigger role to play. At present, it mainly provides guidelines about treatment; its remit should be extended to embrace prevention. Education should start in schools; I launched the UK’s first fertility education module pilot in 2016 and there is a strong case to include it in the national curriculum."

Tackling the underlying causes...

"Unless we address social determinants of health such as housing, employment, heating and living conditions for families, which are risk factors for poor health, we cannot achieve upstream prevention."

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