How to move from managing sick individuals to creating healthy communities

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’.