After over a 100 years of progress, the health and well being of the British public is now going in reverse, according to Andy Haldane, the chief executive of the Royal Society of Arts giving the Health Foundation’s REAL Challenge lecture.
“We’re in a situation for the first time, probably since the Industrial Revolution, where health and wellbeing are in retreat,” he said.
This trend can be seen in recent data published by the Health Foundation on the increasing number of people aged 50-69 not working due to ill health.
The reasons for this trend are complicated, but the Health Foundation noted that although Covid-19 is a factor, due to long Covid and the backlog in health care, the problem began before the pandemic.
One major factor is that just as public health services have been the main driver of increasing the health of the population for more than one hundred years, their downgrading and underfunding over successive Conservative governments is now a major contributor to a reversal of all those years of progress and a reduction in the health and wellbeing of the nation.
Full story in The Lowdown, 14 November 2022