Challenge 5 | Living Well in South London
Speakers: Oliver Brady, Programme Lead, Long-Term Conditions, Health Innovation Network South London | Alon Stoerman, Product Management Consultant and Mentor, re:Action Health Technologies | Professor Dan Frings, Professor in Social Psychology, London South Bank University | Dr Paul Riley, General Practitioner, South West London | Grace Neal, Programme Manager of Prevention & Healthy Weight, NHS South West London Integrated Care Board
Oliver Brady, Programme Lead, Long-Term Conditions, Health Innovation Network South London
There’s probably never been greater prominence in the news or government policy about the impact of ill health on our society and the people who live within it. What we need to do within healthcare is focus resources on two areas. The first is preventing people from developing long-term physical and mental health conditions in the first place – the types of conditions that contribute greatly to the long-term ill health that affects society as a whole. The second area is in preventing those who have existing conditions from deteriorating and developing worse outcomes as a result.
There are lots of innovations already coming through the pipeline – some of those are here with us today – we’ve also got digital innovations, new drugs, and fantastic service innovations that we see across the sector, and we’re engaging with patients in new ways as a result.
So today, we’re going to explore how various conduits in attendance today – academics and healthcare professionals and digital innovators, policymakers, local authorities, and community groups – can work together creatively to tackle these challenges and do so in a way that addresses some of the challenging health inequalities that particularly materialise in this part of the sector. We see that these inequalities affect the poorest and most vulnerable members of our society, and as a result, they’re facing the toughest outcomes.
I think I’ll now ask our panellists to introduce themselves and, in the spirit of optimism, tell us which innovations they think will have the biggest impact in South London over the next ten years or so.
Professor Dan Frings, Professor in Social Psychology, London South Bank University
My name is Professor Dan Frings. I’m a Professor of Social Psychology at London South Bank University, and I’m also the Associate Dean for Research and Enterprise for the School of Applied Sciences. My training was very much as a social psychologist, but over the last few years, probably five or six years, I’ve also been involved in digital health in various ways. I started by doing a randomised control trial for the stop smoking intervention, which led to working with lots of SMEs all the way through to multi-trust AI interventions, which I’ve been really lucky enough to help evaluate.
In terms of the innovations we need to lean into for making a happier and healthier South London, it’s kind of torn, right? There has been more and more evidence from the last 10 years or so, in particular from social psychology, demonstrating that social connections and social identity are amazing tools to help us recover from mental health problems. They also reduce the prevalence of those conditions in populations that are well-integrated and well-connected, but they also help us buffer the transitions that often take place during and following recovery from chronic health conditions. So if you have invasive surgery or develop a long-term health condition, the more social connections you have, and the more you’re able to maintain, is a direct predictor of how well you will be six months or a year further down the line. So there is something incredibly powerful and probably under-harnessed about social connections, and I think that’s one of the things we need to lean into.
Dr Paul Riley, General Practitioner, South West London
I’m Dr Paul Riley, a GP in South West London, and I have a long-term interest in what we call plan care and -long-term condition care in particular. You gave a great introduction and background summary as to why planned care and long-term condition care are incredibly important and, I think, more fundamental than what most of the public think about when they think about their needs from the healthcare sector.
The public tends to think about access – “I’m unwell now, I have pain now, how quickly can I see somebody as a result?” – whilst politicians tend to spend a lot of time thinking about access and demand. If we spend more time thinking about chronic disease and investing better in supporting patients with chronic disease, the access demand will naturally come down. I also have an interest in improving the value of care by looking at our outcomes. A lot of time, people only talk about productivity rather than output in healthcare, but if we keep doing the wrong thing more, we’re only going to get things wrong more. So, I think we need to focus more on outcomes to succeed.
I’m very interested in how we can design our processes – particularly in primary care, for instance, as that’s where I work – to focus more on value and efficiency and less on productivity per se. How can we incorporate evidence-based concepts and practices such as personalised care, population health, medicine, and techniques to reduce health inequalities? How can we translate them into delivery on the front line, where we know time is precious and everybody’s very, very pressured in terms of the way they deliver their care? In terms of innovations to improve health and well-being within South London in the coming years, it feels like we’re currently living in a period of innovation. There’s digital innovation, there’s AI innovation, there’s communications innovation, and these all have pluses and minuses, so we have to be very careful to invest our resources in gaining from the benefits that we can, and all the good can come from it, whilst also avoiding some of the pitfalls.
So, for example, during COVID, developments in technology meant that we were suddenly able to communicate with people and have consultations remotely, which was excellent in that scenario. But now that COVID has subsided, we find that lots of patients want to come back to see people face to face; they want to engage face-to-face. I’m sitting next to a sociology professor who understands better than any of us in the room the value of face-to-face interactions, and we can’t just switch that off. We can also now communicate in extraordinary ways that we’ve never been able to before. People might think that’s a great thing, and it is a good thing, but actually, what we’ve seen is it’s also been exploited in ways that you wouldn’t like to see. There’s a lot of misinformation that’s being spread, and we have to address that. We can’t just sit passively and watch the misinformation spread and people have uninformed debates.
The digital AI communication revolution is well and truly here, but we have to join it to play our part, make a difference, and ensure that information communication is done responsibly and accurately.
Alon Stoerman, Product Management Consultant and Mentor, re:Action Health Technologies
Hi all, so I’m Alon, and I’m the founder of re:Action Health Technologies. From my personal experiences of growing up with a Grandmother who had dementia, I found myself questioning what could be done to slow the natural progression of the disease. I decided to take my knowledge as a product manager and translate that into something that could deliver real impact. Paul’s already touched on evidence-based approaches, and that’s exactly what I did. So at re:Action, we’re developing evidence-based, innovative and engaging approaches based on four pillars, helping to keep your body and brain active whilst maintaining those social connections, too.
If we can keep social connections, we are helping not only people with dementia but everyone around them, too. It is this holistic approach that we’re aligned with to help us build the software solutions that will allow us to slow down the progression of the disease. There have been lots of studies in this space that clearly show positive results when keeping dementia patients’ brains active. Since dementia is one of the most expensive and costly health conditions in the UK, we need to create improved solutions to help slow down the progression of the disease. This will, in turn, help our health system save money, save the lives of many patients, and make the disease easier to navigate as a relative or friend of someone with dementia.
Grace Neal, Programme Manager of Prevention & Healthy Weight, NHS South West London Integrated Care Board
Hi, so my name is Grace. I work as a Program Manager at NHS South West London Integrated Care Board (ICB). I suppose my journey into healthcare, or the NHS in particular, started as a clinical dietitian several years ago, and at that point, I was working in a hospital setting, helping patients who had suffered from strokes, heart attacks, kidney disease, and who were losing limbs. I was thinking, I know that a lot of this is preventable, so how can I help people not get to this point? Rather than being here at this point with them, how can we help them manage what is an absolute wrecking ball through a patient and their family’s lives? So, I then went and got a job in the community, working as a Community Dietician, and I ended up, after several years, specialising in diabetes care. I would work one-on-one with patients or in small groups, helping them to understand their condition more because many people didn’t, and that was the first thing I learned.
Most people don’t understand their condition, and secondly, to then help them to manage that condition, and that was a real privilege to be able to do that. But I kind of thought I was not getting to enough people. So even though I’m helping people, I’m not getting to enough people. So I then did a bit of reading and a bit of research and ended up working in the Sustainable and Transformation Plan (STP) department as it was then because that way, I could help to improve care and improve people’s lives at a much larger scale.
Oliver Brady, Programme Lead, Long-Term Conditions, Health Innovation Network South London
For anyone in the room who doesn’t know, the STPs were essentially the forerunners for what we now call the Integrated Care System or Boards, right?
Grace Neal, Programme Manager of Prevention & Healthy Weight, NHS South West London Integrated Care Board
Exactly. So, whilst I’ve been in the same organisation for five years working on this larger population area, it’s clear that we’re still neglecting the preventative element of healthcare and just addressing the symptoms and needs as they develop. In terms of the most important innovation, I really would say that what we’re doing now as an Integrated Care Board, by pulling together all of those different partners that can have an impact on people’s lives to deliver new partnerships and collaborations for innovation, is the most important aspect of future innovation.
Oliver Brady, Programme Lead, Long-Term Conditions, Health Innovation Network South London
That’s fantastic, so if I start again with you, Grace, what are some of the things you’ve learnt from the last five years at the ICB that we can take forward for the next five to start making transformative change?
Grace Neal, Programme Manager of Prevention & Healthy Weight, NHS South West London Integrated Care Board
Absolutely,
So, as I said, when we were delivering diabetes work at scale and making these improvements, we managed to sneak one or two prevention projects in, and one of them was called the Prevention Decathlon Programme. Now, this was quite innovative – think of it as a digitally enhanced National Diabetes Programme, if any of you are familiar with that one. So this programme we run is open to anybody who’s at risk of diabetes to help them prevent developing the disease, and through digital innovation, we can spread the news wider and digitally enhance the traditional programme.
One of the things that we did was add personalised video messaging to the platform so any person who was invited to the programme received a personalised video that explained what their test results were and why they were at risk and explored whether they would like to come to the programme. It then provided them with a link so that they could click through and book the programme in one simple step.
Another part of that was that after each session, we would send the patient a video that summarised the contents of the session and multiple choice questions to enhance that engagement whilst reiterating some of the key learnings.
Another element of the programme was that we partnered with an organisation called Sweatcoin, and they’re a digital incentivisation organisation. I don’t know if any of you have heard of them before, but if a participant of our programme downloaded their app, any steps that that person did were then converted into “Sweatcoins”, hence the name! Those coins could be traded in for prizes, and we made sure that those prizes were tailored to the programme. So, they might be a sweatband one week, or a yoga mat or a drinks bottle – you know, something that motivated participants to engage and keep active.
The other thing that Sweatcoin did was offer questions – like a quiz – at the end of each week, and if participants answered correctly, they could also earn Sweatcoins that way. The team designed a leaderboard, and we divided each group up into teams which had to work together because they were trying to outdo the number of steps and the number of coins that the other team got. This was not only beneficial in terms of programme engagement, but it also formed connections between participants, circling back to that community element that we discussed earlier.
The core purpose of the programme was to reduce the risk of people developing various health conditions, but for myself and my colleague Chris, we wanted people to make friends. We wanted it to be fun, and I would say that that was exactly what happened. In all of this, the digital element was the enabler because what people would do after the sessions was go on and organise walking groups outside of the session and have WhatsApp groups for communication and encouragement. For us, that was so lovely to see.
Another project is the Diabetes Book and Learn. Now, again, I don’t know if any of you have relatives who have diabetes or anybody else you know, but if you get diagnosed with diabetes, you have the option of going on a course to learn everything about the condition to help you manage it better. The Diabetes Book and Learn is a booking platform where you can book a course – and I know that does not sound very transformational.
Okay, it’s a platform I can book a course on. But each borough would procure a particular course, so let’s talk about one of the courses called Desmond. Let’s say you lived in Wandsworth, and the only option you had was to go to Desmond on a Wednesday morning. Now that’s rubbish if you work, right? But if you lived in Richmond, you could go on the Expert Patient on a Saturday afternoon, which is far more accessible if you work a traditional 9-5. However, that person in Wandsworth who works a 9-5 Monday to Friday wouldn’t be eligible to attend the one in Richmond. So what we did is we opened these programmes up for the whole of South London so that any patient anywhere in Southwest London could go on any programme at a time that suited them.
The other thing about opening it up and going across such a large footprint is we had bulk buying power. We could buy lots of digital programmes as well to further that support, which then opened the pathway to more people who probably wouldn’t have gone on some of the diabetes courses. And I never thought I’d say this, but then COVID arrived, and in many ways, for the service, it was a godsend. Thanks to our innovation in practices, we had all of these digital options available, which meant more people could access the support and continue to do so even through the lockdowns and restrictions.
Now, four or five years down the line, we’ve got a future for this platform as well because we’re going to try and do a lot more targeted work on there. Where people arrive from particular ethnic minorities or cultural backgrounds, we can help target those people with the appropriate courses. I suppose what I’ve learnt from that is we have all of these digital options, but interestingly, and even during COVID, there was still a significant cohort that we want to do face-to-face, you know? And that’s great, isn’t it, because now we’ve got something for everyone, and they can look at these programmes at any time.
And finally, one of the other routes we took was a Quality Improvement Programme where we helped our colleagues in general practice.
Now, this is where we utilised some of the enhanced population health data, so what we did was we first of all used data and our Southwest London Business Intelligence Data platform to look and see which regional GP practices would probably benefit most from being on the Quality Improvement Programme. Once we identified them, we then went and worked directly with the GP practices, and whilst we were, we then used another platform called Eclipse, which is a risk stratification platform, to help the general practice look and see which patients with diabetes were most at risk. So rather than just waiting for the patient to come to them when they’re poorly, or they’ve been admitted to the hospital, let’s have a look at some of their risk factors. Let’s bring them in, and let’s target those at higher risk for care.
But the most interesting thing about this project, and this is what I’m going to leave you all on, was with a couple of the practices, we did a bit of deep dive. We looked under the hood because we wanted to see what was driving demand in these cohorts. And when we got down to it, the amazing thing is that it was actually social complexity that was driving demand, not medical complexity, and that’s quite breathtaking when you think about it. So, the demand for our healthcare services is mostly driven by social complexity rather than medical complexity when it comes to some of the long-term conditions. And I suppose to end on that note because it nicely dovetails me back to my starting point, which is why the ICB’s coming together is the best thing that can happen for our population’s health outcomes because if we’ve got social completely driving the demand in health services, that’s not so good is it? We need to work together to tackle that, and that’s why we need all of the partners in the system to work together.
Oliver Brady, Programme Lead, Long-Term Conditions, Health Innovation Network South London
Thanks, Grace, and that’s a really nice segway into my next question, which is going to be for Dan. We’ve had all the panellists talk about the importance of tackling such social factors and using that as a means to prevent chronic disease. But how do we go about doing that? Well, how can the partners work together to make the most of their combined resources?
Professor Dan Frings, Professor in Social Psychology, London South Bank University
So, I always think about edges, right? Where do services butt up against each other, and is that an area where change should happen? That’s often where focus should be shifted to, but it can be difficult to navigate, and I think, in some ways, we’re seeing those edges change in areas around public health. The education system and health system, for example, are more closely aligned and engage with one another regularly. Where we aren’t seeing this synergy, however, is in social welfare and health. Many still view these areas as two separate things with two separate budgets, thinking, “If I spent my money here, I need to see my return here.” So, an intervention which supports social welfare will drive down overall health costs, but you’re only going to do that if you also see a return on a social welfare budget somewhere else.
I think it must be a whole system approach, and that’s where the big challenge is. We have little systems within any given service, and then we have these big systems, which I think generally understand that they’re connected and want to change, but the inertia with those huge systems is so great that it makes it very difficult.
Oliver Brady, Programme Lead, Long-Term Conditions, Health Innovation Network South London
One of the big challenges that we’ve seen with trying to sustain prevention programmes is around the timeframe where we’re going to start seeing those benefits financially. So there’s always a bit of a leap of faith around the certainty of a project being funded, and when you’re splitting that risk across different organisations, which might have slightly different timelines where they need the impact to materialise, it creates a real challenge. I don’t think I’ve got an answer for that, but how, Dan, do you evaluate prevention initiatives effectively to mitigate that risk?
Professor Dan Frings, Professor in Social Psychology, London South Bank University
If I could be a very optimistic social psychologist, I would say you bring these different groups of stakeholders together and task them in an interdependent way to figure it out. Right? That is a very optimistic approach, but the reality is that in these sorts of sessions, there will be people from public health, local government, and people who have lived experience all in the room together, and that’s where those edges can mix up a bit.
Oliver Brady, Programme Lead, Long-Term Conditions, Health Innovation Network South London
If we think about that then, Paul, and how this all ties into the NHS, we’ve seen a lot of demand for GP services driven not necessarily by the physical condition that people have but rather from the social factors behind those conditions. So, where can we have the biggest impacts in this area, and what support do you need from the other partners in this room and the wider community to make a difference?
Dr Paul Riley, General Practitioner, South West London
I think although we’re all from slightly different organisations, we’re going to end up saying very similar things, which is probably a good thing and suggests that integrated working in some way, shape and performance is happening and is working. I just want to speak to the point that you made, Grace, because you made a really good point about patient choice. So digital works very well for some people, whilst others don’t want to use it. They want traditional face-to-face, and this is the case in the NHS where most of our patients come from the elderly groups, and they are the cohorts in that later stage of life, who by default, are always going to be the ones who are less up to date with the latest technology. So, we have this challenge of introducing the latest technology to the NHS, where the main users of the service are the least likely to be able to take it up.
But back to your question on it, I think the health and well-being of the community and what determines it is fantastically complex, and this is the reality – nobody can sit and say that they have the perfect answer.
If you take cardiovascular disease as an example, in heart attacks, what comes before the heart attack? Well, we know very well that you’ve got certain disease risk factors for heart attacks: diabetes, high blood pressure, and chronic kidney disease, but what comes before those disease risk factors? Well, we know you’ve got lifestyle risk factors, you’ve got smoking, you’ve got physical inactivity, you’ve got excess alcohol consumption. But before any of those lifestyle risk factors, you’ve got stress, the mental health crisis we’re seeing at the moment, and much of that stems from socio-economic determinants of health. You’ve got your housing crisis and the cost-of-living crisis, and before long, you can draw a series of lines from global activity to the health and well-being of your local community. So, I suppose the question we have to ask ourselves is, where can we fit in? Because no one party can cover that whole spectrum of challenges.
So, we at the NHS as an organisation have to say, “Ok, we’re a part of this. But which part should we play, and how can we play that role best?” Ultimately, this must be a collaborative effort.
We have some very specialist skills in NHS clinicians, but we tend to get involved at the end of the line when somebody has the disease. Yes, we have expertise in medication and in treating disease, and we should recognise that expertise, but we also must collaborate with our partners, other providers, other organisations, and most importantly, I think, with the community that we serve to really drive that success. Health is created and cured in the community, and I think it has got to be a kind of bottom-up approach. We have to educate better; we have to understand our communities better, we have to co-create better. We have to take Population Health value-based approaches and be trained to do this, which we’re not actually at the moment, I would argue, in the NHS. The final factor is that we then have to be incentivised to do it. Even if you’ve got the training, if you’re not incentivised to work in this collaborative way and deliver population management approaches, or if your goal is not to reduce health inequalities, it simply won’t happen.
Oliver Brady, Programme Lead, Long-Term Conditions, Health Innovation Network South London
If you think about that collaboration at a more local level, around the social side, what do you think is the best way as a GP practice to engage with community sector organisations in your community? And along with that, how can that process be made easier? Because I think, again, the funding question is equally as challenging for those organisations as it is for our mainstream health service. Have you seen any great examples of where this has already been done well in South London?
Dr Paul Riley, General Practitioner, South West London
Yeah, so we’re already doing it locally, primarily because we have those incredibly passionate clinicians who believe in community engagement. I would argue that it’s not particularly well incentivised at the moment, and then you find yourself relying on those sorts of heroic efforts, which, whilst they are vital, aren’t enough to change a whole system. You need to make those community efforts the norm and ensure that primary care knows and understands who its community leaders are and the role that they can play.
And actually, some plusses came from COVID, one being the fact that organisations, local authorities, the third sector, the private sector, and NHS all worked together extremely well. The other thing that came from it was that we really got to understand who the patients trust: certainly not politicians, it’s not us as doctors, it’s community leaders, faith leaders and those types of figures.
So ultimately, we’ve got to be incentivised to make links with the community leaders, run joint events, share and educate and get them out there spreading healthy messages. It can’t just come from us as doctors.
Oliver Brady, Programme Lead, Long-Term Conditions, Health Innovation Network South London
There needs to be a formalisation of some of these relationships then. If I can bring discussions back to digital, we’ve heard a lot about the importance of engaging communities, the social factors behind that, and how different projects can approach those in different ways. An underlying enabler of all of this is digital access. So, how can the healthcare system access the best of innovation? Because I think that’s sometimes where the healthcare system falls. Perhaps I can ask you, Alon, what are some of the big challenges you face as an innovator in terms of getting your product in front of the right people?
Alon Stoerman, Product Management Consultant and Mentor, re:Action Health Technologies The challenge is not the technology. We have the technology, and we can do quite a lot with it already. The challenge is the acceptance of technology. If I can offer a quick example of how important technology can be, if you, as a GP, receive a patient who just arrived from a hospital outside your area, you probably know nothing about them. We need to streamline and simplify the sharing of patient data, and there are several countries where it is already working in that way. It needs to be that practitioners can see data about their patients and what has happened in their medical history quickly and efficiently.
We really, we really need to be able to shift and use the data in collaboration with other organisations. Another example is the use of AI. Before programmes like ChatGPT took off, we were talking about implementing AI into solutions, and people were telling me, you’re crazy, this is the next exterminator. But no, AI, as people are adjusting to now, is a good way of processing data. A quick example here, but when we are using AI to help identify results from MRI scans, the use of this technology can improve the understanding and interpretation of results by as much as 44% compared to the pre-AI revolution.
And we’re still in the very early days of AI. There are many examples of where this technology can help in making sure that clinicians when they speak with patients, have the right time to do so instead of dealing with bureaucracy and sourcing missing data. This is where technology can really help us move forward. It’s something that we need to learn how to adapt to and collaborate on to progress and make it into something that is accessible and being used in the right way.
Oliver Brady, Programme Lead, Long-Term Conditions, Health Innovation Network South London
I guess the challenge that we find is that maybe the technology outpaces the capabilities of the system to adopt that technology. Then, we also have the other challenge which Paul mentioned earlier around the demographics of so many of the people that we’re trying to help. Rishi, in the session upstairs, mentioned that the power of AI is about unlocking time from clinicians – so by doing things more efficiently, they can spend that time working on the social side of care that we’ve spoken about today. So, how can we all start working in partnership better to start moving healthcare settings towards interacting more productively with the healthcare sector?
Alon Stoerman, Product Management Consultant and Mentor, re:Action Health Technologies I think it’s mainly about acceptance and reducing barriers. For example, when I moved to my new GP, I filled in the form online, and then when I arrived over there, they gave me a piece of paper and told me to fill it in again. That makes no sense, but they said, “No, this is just the way that people are used to it.” So, I think that it’s easy to blame the general population, but we need to try and reduce those key barriers, and both understand and accept that technology is not going against us. We need to make the most out of it and implement it as much as possible because, without the help of technology, we won’t be able to move forward and improve a health system that is really struggling at the moment.
Professor Dan Frings, Professor in Social Psychology, London South Bank University
Yes, I mean, we know that one of the biggest predictors of the uptake of AI technologies in clinicians is trust. And I think we do have this vision that AI will mean that clinicians have more time to spend with patients. But I’m not sure if clinicians have been asked how much they trust that vision because the flip side of that is, well, actually, if I can take five minutes of work away from each case over a day, that is an opportunity to see another patient, right? There are two drivers in all of this, too: an efficiency drive, where we can see more patients, and a quality drive, where we can offer more quality appointments where patients can walk away feeling happy with the treatment and advice they have received. Different audiences are each sold different dreams in terms of the outcomes from the AI uptake, and which dream everyone agrees on is actually very important.
Dr Paul Riley, General Practitioner, South West London
It’s quite difficult to speak in such broad terms. There’s so much technology can do, but when you’re trying to evaluate, is this good or is this bad and for who?, there’s no single answer. Talking from my experience in GP, I spend a significant portion of my time doing more administrative work than I do seeing patients, and I don’t want that. I definitely want to do my job, and if I could swap some of that administrative work for patient contact, I would be very happy to do it. And I think most of my colleagues are in the same boat. So, in that aspect, it’s not a concern; it’s a plus, but I think you have to talk very specifically about each intervention. It’s not clear-cut.
Oliver Brady, Programme Lead, Long-Term Conditions, Health Innovation Network South London
Indeed. So, we have had one question through on the Slido, and it was addressed to Grace, but I wonder if all of the panellists may have a view on it. In terms of the GLP-1 discussion, why focus solely on medication and not include alternative, non-invasive treatments like hyperbaric oxygen therapy for prevention?
Grace Neal, Programme Manager of Prevention & Healthy Weight, NHS South West London Integrated Care Board
I suppose the reason I focused on the medication was because it’s a new innovation. I think everybody feels, especially in healthcare, that this medication, in particular, is going to have a significant impact on the general population. We know that there are alternatives, and I’m a dietitian, so if anybody’s going to sing the praises for alternatives, it would obviously be me.
However, the evidence shows that some of the outcomes from alternatives aren’t long-term. So even if somebody can lose weight through, say, diet and exercise, for example, whether it’s incentivised or not. Unfortunately, the longer-term outcome means that that weight doesn’t stay off. And there are biochemical reasons for that, physiological reasons, as well as environmental reasons, so in instances where medication can help, why not? If other methods don’t help, then let’s try them because I think we would be silly not to. We know that being overweight and obesity as a condition is linked to so many long-term conditions, and a recent study also showed that those who are obese are predisposed to as many as 32 cancers.
And whilst yes, this service and medication is going to cost the health service an obscene amount of money, it can help change people’s lives and reduce reliance on other services across the sector.
Oliver Brady, Programme Lead, Long-Term Conditions, Health Innovation Network South London
The interesting thing, from my perspective, is how we can ensure that getting the right person to the right therapies for them whilst also addressing the underlying social causes that might cause them to present to the health service again. My worry, personally, is that by rushing through new medications and not thinking about them, we won’t get to the right solution. I think, again, that’s something that we need to work in partnership on across the industry.
Dr Paul Riley, General Practitioner, South West London
I think the important thing is that we, as a society, need to act on all those steps and constantly ask ourselves if this is improving the well-being of our communities, right? And medication, in many instances, comes in way after the horse has vaulted, but of course, we continue to invest in medication to improve people’s lives and prevent further problems further down the line. So yes, we need the medication, but we mustn’t think that we can medicate our way out of the obesity epidemic.
Oliver Brady, Programme Lead, Long-Term Conditions, Health Innovation Network South London
So, unfortunately, we have just run out of time but thank you so much to all of our panellists who have joined the session this afternoon. I’m sure they will be hanging around to perhaps continue these discussions, but I hope you enjoy the rest of your afternoons, and it’s been great to have this conversation today.
