NHS health check

NHS health checks are available to people in England between the ages of 40 and 74. The health check consist of an appointment with a healthcare professional at which people are asked about their family history and lifestyle and have their body mass index, blood pressure, and cholesterol concentration measured. Further investigations may then follow.

in January 2008, the then prime minister, Gordon Brown, announced “everyone in England will have access to the right preventative health check-up . . . there will soon be check-ups on offer to monitor for heart disease, strokes, diabetes, and kidney disease.” He also pledged a national screening committee, an independent clinical body, that “will look at the evidence and advise on what additional screening procedures would be genuinely useful in detecting other conditions.”[1]

Every local authority in England is obliged to secure the provision of health checks to be offered to eligible persons (aged from 40 to 74 years) in its area.

The programme of health checks has been criticised as being without evidence of effectiveness by Dr Margaret McCartney.[2] The director of the UK National Screening Committee is reported as saying “There are certainly some aspects of the programme that look and feel like screening. However it is not run as a systematic ‘call-recall’ programme nor does it have quality assurance". John Ashton, president of the Faculty of Public Health, said he has “grave reservations” about health checks. “We are not convinced about the evidence base. There is a danger of medicalising social inequalities—in many ways health checks could be seen as playing into the pharmaceutical agenda. We should be focusing on disadvantaged communities—not finding more worried well.”

In September 2014 Professor Kevin Fenton, head of health and wellbeing at Public Health England, claimed the programme was being run on sound principles and rejected calls from to change track and focus on more opportunistic checking in people known to be at high risk.[3] A study published in the British Journal of General Practice found no significant differences in the change to the prevalence of diabetes, hypertension, Chronic Heart Disease, Chronic Kidney Disease or Atrial Fibrillation in GP practices providing NHS Health Checks compared with control practices.[4]

Peter Walsh, deputy director of the Strategy Group at NHS England admitted that take-up of the checks was poor in January 2016, after a study showed that 20% of those eligible aged 60-74 attended and 9.0% of those between 40–59.[5]

In May 2016 researchers from Imperial College London concluded that the checkup reduced the 10-year risk of cardiovascular disease by 0.21%, equivalent to one stroke or heart attack avoided every year for 4,762 people who attend. The programme cost £165 million a year.[6]

References

  1. ↑ "In full: Brown speech on the NHS". BBC News. 7 January 2008. Retrieved 11 November 2013.
  2. ↑ "Too Much Medicine Where's the evidence for NHS health checks?". British Medical Journal. 2 October 2013. Retrieved 11 November 2013.
  3. ↑ "NHS Health Checks programme 'evidence based', public health chief insists". Pulse. 17 September 2014. Retrieved 18 September 2014.
  4. ↑ Caley, Michael; Chohan, Paradip; Hooper, James; Wright, Nicola (1 August 2014). "The impact of NHS Health Checks on the prevalence of disease in general practices: a controlled study" (Vol 64 no 625). British Journal of General Practice,. Retrieved 18 September 2014.
  5. ↑ "Take up of health checks are "not strong, to put it mildly"". Nursing in practice. 15 January 2016. Retrieved 6 April 2016.
  6. ↑ "NHS "mid-life MOT" has marginal health benefits, say researchers". Imperial College. 3 May 2016. Retrieved 3 May 2016.

External links

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