Public health: Nanny knows best?

Topics: public health, Tony Blair's speech and related links

Prime Minister Tony Blair made quite a speech on public health by promoting healthier choices yesterday. Some of it was about the philosophy of government - i.e. how much role for the State, what can government do most effectively - and that's a debate for another time.

But here were some quite interesting bits that caught my eye (emphasis below is all mine).

In the future, health care cannot be just about treating the sick but must be about helping us to live healthily; this requires more from all of us, individuals, companies and Government and for Government it has to encourage, it has to inform, but, if necessary, in a tougher way than ever before, it has to be prepared to act.
....

Our public health problems are not, strictly speaking, public health
questions at all. They are questions of individual lifestyle - obesity, smoking, alcohol abuse, diabetes, sexually transmitted
disease. These are not epidemics in the epidemiological sense. They are the result of millions of individual decisions, at millions of points in time. For example, 20 per cent of all children in the UK eat no fruit or vegetables in a week. 65 per cent of adults and half of all children do not take the recommended amount of exercise.
...

The truth is we all pay a collective price for the failure to take shared responsibility. That doesn't mean you stop treating people in the NHS who smoke or force people to do what they don't choose to do but it does mean that Government should play an active role in the way the enabling state should work: empowering people to choose responsibly.
...

In 10 years time, and if possible long before, I want the health debate in Britain not to be confined to the excellent NHS that treats people when they are sick; but to the broader national health service that is about prevention as much as cure, about personal responsibility as much as collective responsibility, about the quality of living as much as life expectancy.

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And in related stories...

• Tony Blair calls for the end of the Nanny state, as people are less likely to respond to Government campaigns and more likely to respond to "social marketing" of healthy messages from the private and voluntary sector.
• Blair told there's a bigger role for the private sector in public health provision in a series of "expert papers" on public health and healthier choices.
• A paper from the DfES on the role of education in children's long term health.
• There's more than one benefit in going to the gym for the over 50s (wink, wink, nudge, nudge).

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