European Public Health🔹Fellow, Royal College of Physicians🔹Honorary Member, Faculty of Public Health/European Public Health Association🔹Expert Committee, European Health Forum🔹EU Advisor, EurohealthNet🔹Member,CMT-UK
🇬🇧🇪🇺 ”#Prevention is better than cure”: How to get from political rhetoric of the new Labour Party (UK) government to making prevention a routine part of government business - and the problem finds the same pattern across #Europe and the world. Given that this idea has risen then fallen off the policy agenda so often, what would make the difference this time? “Three factors explain this gap between enthusiastic intent and real-world practices: low #clarity, #congruence, and #capacity.” 🔹To start with clarity. The language of prevention is vague, which helps to maximise initial support, but delays discussion on how to translate abstract aims into concrete action. 🔹Secondly, when governments make sense of prevention, they struggle to relate it to the everyday routines and rhythms of policymaking or connect it to higher priority agendas. 🔹Finally, capacity. Preventive policies are often akin to capital investment – spend now and benefit in the future – but without a clearly supported way to demonstrate a return on the investment. By Paul Cairney, Professor of Politics and Public Policy, University of Stirling, John Boswell, Professor of Politics and International Relations, University of Southampton and Dr Emily St.Denny, Assistant Professor, Københavns Universitet - University of Copenhagen UK in a Changing Europe NHS Confederation
Super - and very true; easy to say, but apparently/clearly much harder to actually do. Which leads also to the good old point; repeating the same actions and expecting different results should be a very obvious wrong strategy for anyone. So new metrics, new ways of breaking the cycle is needed. Personally hope that this new Labour (small n) will embrace wellbeing economy as path to chart a way out of the gravity well.