Response to 'Advancing Our Health' Green Paper

The Centre for Perioperative Care (CPOC) welcomes this opportunity to respond to the Government’s consultation document, Advancing Our Health: Prevention in the 2020s. In recent years, the NHS has moved away from a system built around prevention to instead focus its efforts on immediate, acute demand. This Green Paper is a chance to rebalance the NHS from an illness to a wellness service.

Click here to read the Government Green Paper.

The commitments outlined, combined with those in NHS England’s Long-Term Plan, recognise the key role the NHS has to play in reducing health inequalities and tackling obesity, smoking and alcohol intake. 

One way that it can do this is through the development of perioperative care – the integrated care of patients from the moment surgery is contemplated through to full recovery. By empowering the millions of patients undertaking a surgical procedure each year to adopt healthier lifestyles and change behaviour ahead of their operation, the NHS can improve patient care and population health, while reducing costs.

Key recommendations

CPOC's key recommendations are that the Government should actively support and facilitate:

• the adoption of the perioperative care approach across specialties to streamline and improve clinical care pathways
• the embedding of prevention, including perioperative care pathways and prehabilitation programmes, into routine clinical practice to ensure that every opportunity to improve the patient health is fully realised
• the implementation of perioperative care pathways across integrated care systems (ICSs), enabling providers to work collaboratively and deliver seamless patient care and long term population health benefits.

Click here to read our full response to the Green Paper.