Those that know me well will know that I am passionate about health prevention. I think we spend far too much money trying to deal with things once they have happened and next to nothing preventing it in the first place!. This means that people unnecessarily suffer poor health, take up hospital beds and become a massive burden on the NHS. This has a significant impact on NHS budgets, the central government finances and hence us all through taxation.
Improved health education and early intervention could help prevent large numbers of people suffering from obesity, diabetes, alcoholism, smoking related illnesses and mental health issues to name a few. However the government and NHS only pays lip service to prevention and has no real long term strategy and does not allocate enough finance to it. I guess we can’t really blame the NHS as their priority will always be dealing with those people who present at our hospitals and doctors surgeries. We all know they never have enough funding to keep up with these activities, evidence by long waits in A&E, long waits for an ambulance, long waits for doctor’s appointments and long lists of those waiting for operations and other medical interventions. It is therefore inevitable for the NHS health prevention goes to the back burner.
The cynic in me thinks that government really does not want to make any real efforts in respect of prevention because there are no quick wins (those that win votes and politicians can shout about). Health prevention strategies take decades to show the benefits. Things that we do on prevention with our young people now in their early years, or teens, will probably not show real benefits until they are in their 40’s and 50’s. This is why successive governments fail to grasp the issue and do something significant and long term.
So is “prevention is better than cure?” well obviously it is, in fact prevention is really the only way, as for many with long term or life limiting illnesses that could have been prevented , there is no cure!
So sooner or later government and the NHS will have to take prevention seriously as there is not a bottomless pot of money to fund the NHS. In the meantime prevention work in the UK is mainly funded and run by charitable and voluntary organisations.
This is why I support the work of Life Education. Life Education was started by the Reverend Ted Noffs in 1974 in Sydney Australia. Following a visit by HRH The Prince of Wales, Life Education came to the UK in 1986, with extensive support, to this day, from the Rotarian movement. The Life Education strapline is “Helping Children Make Healthy Choices”. Life Education gives young people information to enable them to make informed healthy choices, it also empowers young people to deal with situations such as friendship, bullying and cyber safety. It aims to provide this information in a structured way , reinforced by visits and developing themes over successive years.
Today I chair Life Education Wessex and Thames Valley which provides services to 80,000 young people in Devon, Somerset, Dorset, Hampshire, Oxfordshire, Berkshire, Buckinghamshire and 
Swindon. http://lifeeducationwessex.org.uk/
I got involved after my own children had visits at their schools and the sessions impacted so much on them and still does to this day.
As well as the traditional class room session Life Education can do class room based sessions on Cyber Safety with beCyberwise sessions. We also work to help address issues that young people have due to their circumstances such as adoption. The Adoptables is a peer network of adopted young people that enables them to express their views about their experiences as adopted children at home, in school and in post-adoption support.
The latest Life Education strand is the SCARF product. Alongside our mobile classroom visit, SCARF provides a whole-school approach to building these essential foundations – crucial for children to achieve their best, academically and socially.
- SCARF is a flexible resource. Mapped to the PSHE programmes of study, it can either be used as a lesson-a-week programme, or tailored to fit your requirements.
- Unique online planning and assessment tools ensure that busy teachers can quickly build a programme to match pupils’ needs.
- SCARF makes life easier for teachers by providing all the building blocks needed to deliver a planned, progressive PSHE and Wellbeing programme throughout the primary years.
So in the absence of government funded health education programmes, please support the work of charities such as Life Education. If you really want our young people to grow into healthy adults and to live long and healthy lives we have to do something.
Gary Hepburn is a business owner, consultant and company director. He has held senior positions in public, private and multi-national companies, a company group pension fund the NHS and Police Authority. Gary is involved in many voluntary and charitable organisations including Coram Life Education, Life Education Wessex and Thames Valley, The Scout Association, Weymouth Town Charities, Weymouth Carnival as well as being a governor at a school federation and churchwarden at his local church. Gary’s interests are mental health, pre hospital emergency care, resuscitation, medical training, health & safety, fire safety, and health prevention and health and well-being education.