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Public Health (England)

I was really disappointed in the comments made by the hon. Member for Westbury (Dr. Murrison). They struck me as very old-fashioned in their approach to public health, and demonstrated a narrowness of approach and a failure to acknowledge that public health embraces most of what goes on in our society. We need to take a much more holistic approach to public health, rather than concentrating on narrow clinical indicators, which many of today’s contributions seem to have done. The hon. Gentleman also failed to deal with some of the underlying issues affecting public health in the United Kingdom today, including school food. I shall talk in a moment about some of the good work being done in Hull from which the rest of the country could learn. I was pleased to hear the contribution of my right hon. Friend the Member for Rother Valley (Mr. Barron), who took a much broader approach to the public health debate, which is the proper and most sensible approach. I was also intrigued to hear the comments of the hon. Member for Southport (Dr. Pugh), who talked about public health needing all the friends that it could get. In my experience, the Lib Dems are certainly not the friends of public health in my constituency. I should like to add to the broader comments of my right hon. Friend the Member for Rother Valley. Enormous strides have been made in recent years, and we should congratulate the Government on making public health a key target for the well-being of the United Kingdom, as well as its economic well-being. Having healthy citizens will be key to our success. Public health is a broad issue, and all public sector bodies and authorities should include improving the public health of their communities among their key targets. I was a local authority councillor for eight years, and I have been a non-executive director on a primary care trust and on an acute district general hospital trust. I have seen that we can really make a different when the NHS, local government and the voluntary and community sectors work together. Leaving public health to the NHS alone, however, is not going to solve the problem. Investing in and improving public health has enormous implications for the regeneration of areas such as my constituency. Communities that are blighted by poor health often have low educational achievement, poor housing and poverty of ambition. Those communities are often fractured. As a country, we cannot afford to waste the talents and abilities of people living in our communities. We, as elected politicians, cannot stand by and refuse to accept our responsibility to improve public health. I want to make a couple of comments about yesterday’s debate on the acute sector and the reconfiguration in the NHS. The acute sector swallows up huge amounts of the NHS budget. I was interested in the comments made yesterday by my hon. Friend the Member for Dartford (Dr. Stoate), who said that the vast majority of hospital admissions should be seen as a failure of health policy. I agree wholeheartedly with that analysis. We need to front-load the public health budget in the NHS now to reap the reward in the years to come. If we do so, we will see a reduction in admissions to hospitals and a reduction in the number of people with conditions such as diabetes, coronary heart disease and strokes, and we will improve the life chances and opportunities of people all around the country, who will live longer, in better health. The acute sector has always been the focus of the NHS, but that focus is now shifting—rightly—to improving community facilities and investing in the wider preventive public health agenda.