Weight-loss jabs will be made available to the poorest who have the highest need, the Government has said in the NHS 10-year plan.
The NHS will partner with industry to deliver GLP-1 medications like tirzepatide and semaglutide through a range of innovative models under an ‘ambitious moonshot’ approach.
Patients may be able to access them online or via high street pharmacies under the proposals to offer ‘fast and equitable’ treatment.
Companies will be paid on a ‘pay for impact’ outcomes basis – not just on whether people lose weight but if that translates into fewer heart attacks, strokes or cancer diagnoses, the plan said.
Wraparound support will be provided through expansion of the NHS Digital Weight Management Programme.
What the 10-Year Health Plan says on weight-loss drugs
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The plan hails GLP-1 receptor agonists as ‘one of the standout medical innovations in recent years’ with ‘astounding promise in the treatment of type 2 diabetes and obesity’.
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Ministers will ‘develop new commercial arrangements to speed up access to game changing medicines’, citing the 2023 deal with Eli Lilly in Greater Manchester to evaluate tirzepatide’s role in reducing economic inactivity.
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The Government will prioritise such deals ‘in areas with the worst health outcomes’.
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It pledges to ‘harness scientific innovation, including recent breakthroughs in weight loss medication’, and warns of inequity in access:
‘These medications become the preserve of those who can afford them despite those without the financial means having higher need.’ -
NHS provision will be expanded because ‘the NHS was created to universalise the best’.
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New delivery models will be tested, including:
‘digital only models… delivery in local communities… and models that can work in rural and other less urban geographies.’ -
Ministers will pursue industry partnerships to offer treatments ‘on a pay for impact on health outcomes basis’, meaning payment would depend on reduced heart attacks, strokes, or cancer diagnoses.
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The NHS Digital Weight Management Programme will be doubled in size, reaching 125,000 more people annually.
Source: NHS 10-year plan
It is part of a range of measures also focusing on alcohol, food, tobacco, pollution and obesity to shift the focus from sickness to prevention.
The ‘overall ambition’ will be to halve the gap in healthy life expectancy between the richest and poorest regions, the Government said.
It cites recent research from the Health Foundation that projected one in five people would be living with a major condition by 2040 as people increasingly become sicker earlier in life.
Yet around 70% of cardiovascular disease, 40% of cancers and 40% of dementia are preventable, it said.
If not addressed, health spending would rise at twice the real growth rate of the economy.
It includes creating the first smoke-free generation while also halting the advertising and sponsorship of vapes and other nicotine products.
A new Health Coach programme to be launched later this year will include help with quitting smoking.
In addition to already announced restrictions on junk food advertising to children and the ban of energy drinks to under-16s, school food standards will be updated and more children will be eligible for free school meals.
Schemes will be put in place to encourage more physical activity with more detail to follow from the Department for Culture, Media and Sport. A new digital NHS points scheme will reward people for improving their diets and moving more.
Alcoholic drinks will also face a mandatory requirement to display nutritional information and health warning messages to bring them in line with tobacco and food, the plan said.
Steps are also being taken through the Environmental Improvement Plan to improve air pollution and more work will be done on improving awareness of its health impacts.
Children’s mental health will be addressed though support teams in schools, colleges and universities and new staff to tackle long waits for specialist care, it said.
‘The NHS has too often been fatalistic about its role in prevention,’ the plan says.
‘Typifying this, the share of the NHS budget spent on prevention has effectively been cut by 28% per person in real terms over the past decade, despite the significant rise in long-term and chronic illness.’
The NHS will need to change from a ‘sickness’ to a ‘prevention service’ through getting the basics right on vaccination, screening and early detection.
But in the longer term it will also create a new genomics population health service which supported by AI will help predict likelihood of a person developing a condition before it occurs, support early detection of disease such as cancer, and ‘enable personalised prevention and treatment’.
Genomic testing for pharmacogenomic profiles will be integrated into the NHS over-40s Health Check.
‘In 10 years time, we will have transformed the nation’s health,’ the plan concludes.
‘We will have restarted progress on longevity, healthy life expectancy, made progress through prevention on the biggest killers. And we will have begun narrowing the wide and widening health inequalities that unjustly divide our country.’
Read all of Pulse’s coverage of the 10-year plan here.