NHS could pioneer low-carbon future, says new report

Forum for the Future sets out a vision for sustainable health care

“I saw the doctor today, and he prescribed me some loft insulation…”

It’s 2025 and GPs are as likely to prescribe exercise, healthy-eating vouchers and home improvement regimes as curative treatments. Green gyms are all the rage, everyone has an electronic health passport, and citizen scientists take a key role in disseminating public health information to their communities.

That’s part of the vision of The Health System in 2025, a new report by Forum for the Future for the Sustainable Development Commission. Produced in response to the Government’s Marmot Review into health inequalities, it shows how the NHS can pioneer a low-carbon future that promotes greater health while creating a better quality of life.

There could be cost-savings, too. The World Health Organisation says that  “misdirected care” whereby “resource allocation clusters around curative services at a great cost, [neglects] the potential of primary prevention and health promotion to prevent up to 70% of the disease burden”. By taking a common sense, holistic perspective, health budgets could be redirected to such ‘early interventions’, so tackling the inequalities that lead to ill health at their root.

Forum’s vision brings this to life. It describes how shorter working hours, more contact with the environment, growing localisation of production and consumption, redistribution of wealth towards the poor, and greater service accessibility are all accepted as key drivers of health and wellbeing, and investment is targeted accordingly. 

This implies some fairly radical changes to today’s health system – reaching beyond the traditional remit of the NHS. Those responsible for making these changes will need a long-term view, and a willingness to make policy decisions now whose benefits may only become apparent years down the line. If the Marmot Review turns out to be the first step along a road paved with tangible action, then it will have done a good job. 

Twenty years on
Helping the NHS plan for the future is increasingly at the heart of Forum’s work on health. You can’t plan unless you know what the future might hold, of course – and that’s the focus of Fit for the Future – four scenarios for low-carbon healthcare in 2030, developed for the NHS’s Sustainable Development Unit. The report unveils different ways in which we might seek healthcare in the future, from a reliance on the latest technological fix, to one in which health advice from our local supermarket is the norm. And it considers the potential for backlashes against an endless diet of ‘nannying’ health advice...

12 November 2009