The 26 million: how to care for people living with long-term health conditions

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4.4 • 785 Ratings

🗓️ 7 December 2023

⏱️ 64 minutes

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Summary

How should we think of the 26 million people in the UK living with a long-term health condition? Under the current system, only a handful of long-term conditions are prioritised. This leads to a huge strain on NHS resources and capacity later down the road, as long-term health conditions comprise 50 per cent of all GP appointments and 70 per cent hospital bed days. What's more, 2.5 million working-age adults are out of the labour market because of long-term sickness.

How do we better make the NHS – and politicians – accountable to these patients? With treatment and care of patients with long term conditions estimated to take up around £7 in every £10 of total health and social care expenditure, we urgently need fresh thinking to grasp the scale and scope of this challenge.

Isabel Hardman hosts this special episode of Spectator Briefings with a panel of expert guests:

Guy Opperman MP, Minister for Employment

Lord Nick Markham, Parliamentary Under Secretary of State (Minister for the Lords) - DHSC

Richard Sloggett, Founder – Future Health Research

Georgina Carr, Chief Executive – Neurological Alliance

Todd Manning, VP and General Manager – Abbvie UK

Developed in association with and funded by AbbVie.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Thank you so much for coming to this Spectator panel on how to care for people living with long-term health conditions.
0:14.0	And thank you very much to Abbe for sponsoring this event as well.
0:19.0	I'm Isabel Hardman. I'm the assistant editor at The Spectator.
0:22.7	Just finished a book on the NHS, which you can buy now.
0:25.9	I just thought I'd drop that in.
0:27.7	And we've just got such a wonderful panel,
0:30.9	a real spread of expertise, government experience
0:35.0	in and out of government now and industry as well.
0:38.3	So I think we're going to have a really good discussion for the next hour.
0:41.8	I'm joined by Guy Opperman, who is the Minister for Employment, Richard Sloggett,
0:47.0	who is the founder of Future Health Research.
0:49.4	Lord Markham, who is the Parliamentary Undersecretary of State at the Department of Health, Todd Manning, who is the
0:56.3	VP and general manager at ADV, and Georgina Carr, who is the chief executive of the Neurological
1:01.9	Alliance. Now, long-term health conditions, the title of this fringe event is the 26 million,
1:08.5	which just gives you a sense of the scale of this problem that the government
1:14.9	has to grapple with. Long-term health conditions have become, I think, more salient over the past few
1:21.0	years, partly as a result of the pandemic, partly as a result of our tight labour market. And it's
1:26.0	been really interesting as a political journalist,
1:28.2	seeing the way in which the Department of Work and Pensions
1:30.7	and the Department of Health have started to work more closely together.
1:33.8	And I'm really looking forward to hearing from our ministers
1:37.8	and from our experts about how they've seen the landscape change as well.
	...

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