WIREDGOV

Professor Mike Kelly, Director, Public Health Excellence Centre, NICE:

“Since 2005, NICE has produced guidance on a range of public health topics using the social gradient approach as a starting point. We have either published, or are in the process of developing, public health guidance covering all the six key areas highlighted by this review.

“Our guidance aims to improve the health of the population as a whole and to reduce health inequalities. The interventions we recommend are highly cost effective and represent very good value for money and hence are a good use of public funds.  They also point the way to getting past some of the seemingly intransigent problems of health inequity.

“Public health interventions are extremely good value when compared with the costs of clinical interventions.  We need to shift the emphasis away from medical interventions that treat existing illnesses to interventions to prevent those illnesses developing in the first place, but it needs political support and system change to make this happen.

“A modest switch in resources to public health, to invest in those interventions which have been shown to be effective and cost effective by NICE, would from a societal point of view and a social justice point of view, be an important investment for the future. “