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Today’s Budget 2018 announcement has included extra spending on health and social care but there has been no funding announced for the public health grant which has been cut by around £700 million for the spending period 2015/16 to 2019/20.
Deborah Gold, Chief Executive of NAT (National AIDS Trust) said: “We welcome much needed extra funding for health and social care, but it must be distributed across the health and care system to truly be effective at even sustaining our NHS as we know it, let alone improving it.
“Public Health is a vital component of the system that has been annihilated – this includes services that many people think fall within NHS funding and that are essentially NHS services. Sexual health and drugs prevention and treatment services have been reported as being at crisis point this year – recent evidence shows a consensus amongst sexual health doctors that their services are at breaking point due to cuts to the public health grant.
“Public health services have crucial role in supporting a healthier nation that ultimately costs the NHS less in the long term. These cuts are a total false economy.”