Bells and Whistles but where is the Blueprint for Prevention in the Government’s Ten Year Plan?
The publication of the UK Government's new 10-year health plan was trailed as an ambitious roadmap towards prevention, innovation, and a digitally enabled NHS. Yet despite some strong recommendations, the strategy falls strikingly short of the promises it purports to deliver, particularly when it comes to prevention; tackling obesity, improving chronic disease outcomes, and strengthening the public health workforce.
The marginalisation of qualified nutrition practitioners and the absence of robust, food-first strategies creates a glaring hole in this plan. Without them, the promise of prevention is not just weakened, it is hollow. If prevention is to be taken seriously, the voices and expertise of registered nutrition professionals must not be ignored.
BANT urges the Department of Health and Social Care and the Health Select Committee to revisit the modelling underpinning the obesity projections and to consider a broader, evidence-informed approach that includes regulation, reformulation, food system change, and population-level dietary improvements.
The plan purports to be a ‘new model of care, fit for the future’, so let’s be brave with our remodelling instead of recycling old initiatives and pinning our hopes on AI. Undoubtedly the UK is behind the technological curve but we also lag behind other nations in our approach to prevention and integrative models of care. As it stands, BANT fails to see a ‘new’ paradigm in this model.
Disappointingly, the vast majority of the plan is about changing a national ‘treatment’ service. There is very little about ensuring future health, nor collaboration with other sectors and services outside of the current NHS structures. To deliver whole person health and future-proof the NHS we need to push the boundaries of allopathic medicine and integrate with prevention-led lifestyle medicine.
Whilst BANT welcomes investment in AI, data systems, and acute care innovation, this plan represents a profound missed opportunity to address the upstream drivers of ill health, namely poor diet quality, systemic inequality, and inadequate public health nutrition strategy.
There is a heavy emphasis on digital apps, algorithmic triage, and community health coaches, a model that risks side-lining qualified nutrition and lifestyle medicine practitioners in favour of lower-cost, tech-driven alternatives. This is no substitute for the nuanced, whole-person care that trained practitioners provide, and should be used to enhance not replace.
The proposed shift from hospital to neighbourhood health hubs offers welcome hope for localised services, not dissimilar to existing Family Hubs. BANT welcomes this, but with some scepticism that these hubs simply relocate the burden from hospitals and become overflow treatment centres, as opposed to pioneering prevention-focused hubs for health and wellbeing.
Ideally neighbourhood hubs could pave the way for prevention. The shift from sickness to prevention starts with diet and lifestyle but the plan fails to mention either. Unhealthy habits are formed over a lifetime, and built upon by family beliefs, community and cultural ideals, and societal norms. We need to challenge our nation’s approach to diet and lifestyle and re-educate people on how to eat, move, sleep for health. Local hubs could provide an essential resource, with nutrition and lifestyle practitioners as an essential workforce.
There is disproportionate focus on reducing waiting lists but not on preventing patients needing to go on waiting lists in the first place. A healthy nation should be measured by the number of people returned to a state of health; the goal of nutritional therapy. BANT advocates that the point of intervention needs to occur upstream in primary care if we are to adopt a truly preventative approach. Neighbourhood hubs could then be positioned as the go-to place for patient referrals and integrative care.
The plan also promises to empower people to be active participants in their own care, allowing patients to book via apps and communicate directly with healthcare professionals. Heralded as the front door to the NHS. Disappointingly this does not extend to connecting with nutrition practitioners at the front-end of preventative care, who continue to be excluded by a public healthcare system that could so desperately benefit.
The continued reliance on outdated calorie modelling, vague behavioural 'nudges,' and reiterations of the 2004 Nutrient Profiling Model underscores a disappointing lack of progress. The science has moved on yet the public health narrative and national dietary guidelines have not.
We note with concern that the strategy avoids engaging with the evidence base on food labelling reform, marketing regulation, and the ultra-processed food burden, all of which are crucial levers for sustainable change. BANT has called for action on each in our manifesto. We are now eager to see how the Government proposes to bridge the gap between the NHS plan and the newly announced Healthy Food Standards, our response to which can be read here.
Moreover, the government's new weight management ambitions appear to be built around access to medications, delivered via 'industry partnerships' on a pay-for-impact basis. This raises serious questions about long-term outcomes, equity of access, and what happens when the medication stops. We are also deeply concerned that this pharmacological pivot risks rendering non-pharmaceutical interventions invisible, rather than integrated. BANT’s position on anti-obesity medications (AOMs) and their safe use are clearly laid out in our joint statement with the British Society of Lifestyle Medicine (BSLM) and College of Medicine (CoM). Furthermore, it is unclear how the Government plans to fund medicalised weight management at this scale, and still provide the necessary safeguards for patients.
Crucially, this plan is silent on some of the most pressing public health issues of our time, rising rates of type 2 diabetes, dementia risk reduction, and the intersection of nutrition with mental health. It fails to adequately acknowledge the social determinants of health and disease, or the cumulative impact of chronic underinvestment in prevention and workforce expansion.
This plan may offer digital bells and pharmacological whistles, but sadly it does not deliver on its core promise: to improve the nation's health through prevention.
