Addressing long-term conditions: our healthcare must evolve with our population

Steve Hopkinson, UK Vice President and General Manager | AbbVie

6 min read24 September 2025 Partner content

25 million people in England now live with at least one long-term condition.¹ With these conditions firmly at the heart of the NHS 10 Year Plan and the subject of recent debate in Westminster Hall, Steve Hopkinson (Vice President and General Manager, AbbVie UK) reflects on the need for proactive and sustainable action.

This article has been commissioned and funded by AbbVie. This article is intended for UK parliamentarians, and policy makers, and members of the general public with an interest in health policy.

When the NHS was founded in 1948, it was designed to treat acute illness. Its early pioneers could not have foreseen the scale and complexity of the health challenges the country faces today. Long-term conditions now define the health of the nation, and our healthcare system must urgently evolve to meet that reality.

The surge in long-term conditions is not only a public health crisis but is placing an unprecedented strain on services and affecting government ambitions for economic growth. According to the Office for National Statistics, 104.9 million working days are lost each year due to these conditions.²More than 2.8 million people are out of work for health-related reasons, a figure projected to rise to 4.3 million by the end of this parliament.³

Even as long ago as 2009, half of all GP appointments related to long-term conditions, as well as 70 per cent of hospital bed days.⁴ These conditions account for £7 of every £10 spent on health and social care.⁴ Yet for too many people, the care they receive is inconsistent, poorly joined up, and rarely built around the reality of living with multiple conditions.

These numbers are not just abstract statistics. Behind each one are millions of individuals struggling to access the care that they need. In the therapy areas we work in, like migraine, inflammatory bowel disease and psoriasis, we hear depressingly familiar stories from patients of delayed diagnoses, no consistent point of contact, and disjointed care pathways. People with multiple conditions often have to navigate a system designed around single illnesses.

In my role, I also regularly hear from patient groups and healthcare professionals about the challenges of managing long-term conditions. Their experiences underline how fragmented care can leave people feeling unsupported, and how transformative it can be when care is joined up. These insights reinforce why reforms must be judged by whether they improve people’s lives, not just system performance.

The recognition of long-term conditions in the NHS Ten Year Plan is an important milestone. The Plan makes several meaningful commitments, including personalised care planning, the expansion of community-based multidisciplinary teams, and the roll-out of a Single Patient Record to improve coordination.⁵

These are steps in the right direction and reflect calls that we, alongside a coalition of nine national charities, including National Voices, the Patients Association, and The Richmond Group, have made through The Forgotten Majority campaign.

However, ambition alone will not deliver change. The focus now must be on delivery. Turning these ambitions into lasting change will require ongoing collaboration and attention to the issues that matter most to patients. That includes addressing persistent inequalities in access and outcomes, designing care for those living with multiple conditions, and measuring success through people’s experiences, not just system activity.

Without clear accountability and sustained commitment, there is a risk that the Ten Year Plan becomes another well-meaning policy that fails to shift the dial for the people who need it most. That’s why The Forgotten Majority campaign continues to champion the voices of people living with long-term conditions and ensure it remains a political priority.

The latest phase of our campaign sets out a practical six-step roadmap for government and system leaders, a blueprint designed to turn high-level commitments into real-world progress. These recommendations include:

Establishing a multidisciplinary long-term conditions task force to coordinate national progress
Commissioning NHS Trusts to audit and address gaps in local care
Directing Integrated Care Systems to publish action plans for redesigning support around multimorbidity
And critically, using patient experience and outcomes, not just clinical activity, as core performance metrics

Too often, the focus is on whether care is delivered, not whether it actually works and delivers better outcomes for patients. The blueprint argues that by rethinking incentives, healthcare systems could instead prioritise continuity, quality, and coordination.

Innovative medicines also have a vital role to play. They can help people better manage their conditions, avoid unnecessary hospital admissions, and stay active in their daily lives, in many cases enabling people to remain in work or return more quickly.

Improving care for long-term conditions isn’t just the right thing to do for patients; it’s essential for easing NHS pressures, reducing economic inactivity, and improving the sustainability of the health system. With the NHS Ten Year Plan setting a new direction and growing political will to act, there is a window of opportunity. The challenge is to ensure that reforms are meaningfully delivered, equitably applied, and genuinely improve the lives of the people they’re intended to serve.

The time to act is now. In less than two decades, the number of people with multiple long-term conditions is set to rise sharply as the population ages.⁶ And this isn’t just an issue for older people; one in five people aged 25–64 already live with two or more long-term conditions.⁷ In deprived areas, that figure is even higher.⁷

Tackling long-term conditions provides one of the clearest opportunities to drive both better care and stronger economic performance. We continue to advocate for change in the areas and patient communities we serve, to make sure that the needs of 25 million people are properly understood and fully addressed. However, now is the opportunity for policymakers to grab this with both hands. Long-term conditions are not going away. It’s time the NHS was ready to meet them.

September 2025; UK-ABBV-250322

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