In the run up to the publication of the Government’s Green Paper on prevention, the IPPR has published a report Ending the blame game: The case for a new approach to public health and prevention. The UK has made significant progress on prevention in the past, IPPR says, but we appear to have ‘hit a wall’ with limited progress since 2010. They call for the government’s prevention green paper to deliver a paradigm shift in policy from interventions that ‘blame and punish’ to those that ‘empathise and assist’.
Meanwhile Public Health England’s Health matters: Prevention – a life course approach guidance published last month focuses on taking a life course approach to the prevention of ill health and signposts to evidence-based interventions and tools, as well as to evaluation and monitoring techniques.
It looks at addressing the wider determinants of health that will help improve overall health by helping to improve the conditions into which people are born, live and work. Unlike a disease-oriented approach, which focuses on interventions for a single condition often at a single life stage, a life course approach considers the critical stages, transitions, and settings where large differences can be made in promoting or restoring health and wellbeing.