Sajid Javid’s vow to “level up health” will fail unless the government reverses a decade of cuts to public health, an expert will warn on Monday.
The health secretary, Sajid Javid, has announced the creation of a new Office for Health Improvement and Disparities (OHID) and vowed it will have a “relentless focus” on health inequalities and “a driving mission to level up health”.
But the cross-government effort will flop if ministers do not prioritise the prevention of ill health and urgently restore funding to key public health services, Sir Michael Marmot will say in a speech at the Royal College of Nursing’s (RCN) annual congress.
“We need to adopt a health and social care system which prioritises not just the treatment of illness but how it can be prevented in the first place,” Marmot, the director of the UCL Institute for Health Equity, is expected to say.