How to move from managing sick individuals to creating healthy communities

Luke N Allen; Eleanor Barry; Claire Gilbert; Rory Honney; Eleanor Turner-Moss

doi:10.3399/bjgp19X700337

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How to move from managing sick individuals to creating healthy communities
Timothy J. Oliver

Published on: 03 April 2020
How to move from managing sick individuals to creating healthy communities
Carter Singh

Published on: 28 December 2018

Published on: (3 April 2020)

How to move from managing sick individuals to creating healthy communities
Timothy J. Oliver, GP ST2, Nottinghamshire
I wholeheartedly agree this article. Looking to the future in an increasingly complex and technology driven medical world, General practice needs to be able to reimagine itself. One of the great strengths of the profession has been its ability to flex to changing times, and it is going to need to do this in the future. One way of doing this would be for more GPs to take positions on the councils, community groups, school governors, local business committees in order to help shape local health policy.

Developing this, however, I believe that the ideas expressed in this article will have the greatest impact on those from lower socioeconomic communities. These are often the forgotten people of healthy lifestyle marketing campaigns, and yet they represent a large section of the population.

We know these areas have a higher concentration of ‘unhealthy lifestyle’ outlets from fast-food outlets to more betting shops and that companies target these areas with marketing. Conversely, we also know that companies that offer healthy lifestyles solutions target higher socioeconomic areas. As people are heavily influenced by the messages they are exposed to, it is no wonder therefore that more deprived areas have higher levels of associated illnesses.

To expand the policies suggested in this article, I would say that the brunt of the government funding and intervention should to be...
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I wholeheartedly agree this article. Looking to the future in an increasingly complex and technology driven medical world, General practice needs to be able to reimagine itself. One of the great strengths of the profession has been its ability to flex to changing times, and it is going to need to do this in the future. One way of doing this would be for more GPs to take positions on the councils, community groups, school governors, local business committees in order to help shape local health policy.

Developing this, however, I believe that the ideas expressed in this article will have the greatest impact on those from lower socioeconomic communities. These are often the forgotten people of healthy lifestyle marketing campaigns, and yet they represent a large section of the population.

We know these areas have a higher concentration of ‘unhealthy lifestyle’ outlets from fast-food outlets to more betting shops and that companies target these areas with marketing. Conversely, we also know that companies that offer healthy lifestyles solutions target higher socioeconomic areas. As people are heavily influenced by the messages they are exposed to, it is no wonder therefore that more deprived areas have higher levels of associated illnesses.

To expand the policies suggested in this article, I would say that the brunt of the government funding and intervention should to be directed to those areas with the least, rather than the most. Health and lifestyle companies will automatically target the areas where there is the most profit to be made so the government should incentivise them to target poorer areas.

As GPs have often been present in these communities for many years, they are ideally placed to be part of a potential shift of redirected resources. GPs should be trained with areas such as TV advertising, health care apps, cookery programs, sports advertising etc, specifically aimed at this section of society. I believe this is one way to help transform deprived areas in to healthy communities.

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Competing Interests: None declared.
Published on: (28 December 2018)

How to move from managing sick individuals to creating healthy communities
Carter Singh, GP Partner FRCGP, Willowbrook Medical Practice, Nottinghamshire
A most insightful and thought provoking article which echoes the discussions had across the land by GPs of the things that ought to be happening in general practice (rather than the things that are happening).

We are cornered into firefighting on a daily basis, struggling to keep up with exponentially increasing demand and expectations with a backdrop of dwindling funding, litigation, workforce issues and overbearing regulation.

Unfortunately, in real shop-floor time/resource-pressured General Practice we are forced into providing ‘sick care’ rather than the ‘health care’ that we want to provide.

Provision of holistic primary preventive healthcare is proven to yield the biggest bang for the taxpayers’ buck but the benefits realisation of such an approach tends to be medium/long-term rather than short-term. Medium-long term returns are rarely prioritised by the commissioners, as short term needs are often more pressing to plug the ever-increasing year-end deficits.

Public health and commissioners need to take a step back and work collaboratively to ensure that their strategic outlooks are intuitively aligned to invest in ‘health care’ to prevent the insatiable demand of ‘sick care’.

Competing Interests: None declared.