BSLM Response to the new Prime Minister

The British Society of Lifestyle Medicine congratulates Andy Burnham on his appointment as Prime Minister.

BSLM is a non-partisan charity. We work to build the evidence base for lifestyle medicine, to equip clinicians and the wider workforce to practise it, and to see it embedded across health and care. Underpinning all of that is the gap between how long people live and how long they live well, a gap that is widening fastest in the communities that can least afford it.

The Prime Minister arrives with direct experience of creating health rather than only treating illness. Through Live Well and Greater Manchester’s wider prevention work, he has championed the idea that health is built in communities, schools and workplaces long before anyone reaches a hospital. That is health creation, and it is the ground lifestyle medicine occupies.

We would ask the Government to hold to three things:

• Health for all as a golden thread across every department, not the Department of Health alone. Place-based approaches narrow inequalities because they act on the socioeconomic determinants of health at both individual and community level.
• Fund neighbourhoods and the workforce. For example, ICBs and PCNs can no longer afford to train primary care teams or the public in lifestyle medicine. Direct funding would convert intent into practice.
• Start early. The strongest return on prevention is in childhood and adolescence, where habits, mental health and life chances are
  set.

Lifestyle medicine is evidence-based clinical care rooted in three principles: acting on upstream socioeconomic determinants, grounding practice in the science of the pillars, and using proven behaviour change skills. It addresses six pillars: healthy eating, mental wellbeing, healthy relationships, physical activity, restorative sleep, and minimising harmful substances. An approach that asks people to change their behaviour without changing the conditions they live in is not lifestyle medicine.

BSLM and our members stand ready to work with the new government.