Verum writes: Why aren’t we on national health agenda?

Our modern health care system has a number of mysteries associated with it. Among them are; why are all hospitals left to manage their own supply chains – resulting in widely disparate charges to the NHS for the same product, why do only around 60% of NHS staff take up free flu injections and why can I not get an appointment with my GP for two weeks? However the biggest mystery to me is why there is a complete lack of focus on eye health issues within our public health agenda, either nationally or locally.

We are all used to seeing national campaigns relating to high profile health issues such as cancer, obesity and smoking. There are then regular news information stories, on what I would term the next tier of health topics, such as sexual health and recognising the signs of stroke. These are all very sensible and worthy initiatives and my assumption is that these will have been put together through cross agency work, between Public Health England and NHS England and then distributed to the media. We also see lower profile, but still important issues, that come to the fore as new figures become available and highlight a problem.