How much of the rising pressure on the NHS could be relieved by proper funding and organisation of public health and social care? We are far from achieving either: cuts to public health are making people ill; failures of social care are keeping people in hospital when they could be at home.
Pressure on the NHS is nothing new. “Disseminating hyporesourcitis” was The BMJ’s diagnosis back in the Thatcher 1980s (www.bmj.com/content/bmj/292/6529/1212.full.pdf). But the looming crisis is now big enough to be seen if not from space then at least from the United States (https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/16/opinion/nhs-britain-crisis.html). On BMJ Opinion (blogs.bmj.com/bmj) this week the independently minded politician Sarah Wollaston calls for a whole system approach, encompassing public health and social care. These systems cannot be considered in isolation, she says.
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