Prevention: innovation for fairer health

Shifting left to prevention: innovation for fairer health

A report on the UK landscape for prevention and early detection of disease

At a glance

This report sets out the case for urgent action, provides evidence of the economic and health impact of disease prevention, reviews the current policy and innovation landscape, and outlines our intended work to unlock the transformative potential of prevention and early detection in the UK and globally.

Date published: April 2026

Summary

Prevention and early detection of disease are central to improving the health and prosperity of the UK, yet our health system continues to face persistent challenges in realising their full potential. The burden of disease is rising, healthy life expectancy is declining, and the gap between the most and least deprived is widening. As this happens, costs for individuals, the NHS and the wider economy are mounting each year. 

Despite robust public health thinking in the UK and evidence of the cost-effectiveness of prevention, investment and action remain misaligned. There is an urgent need for a more ambitious approach to put in place existing, well-evidenced policies alongside the development of new interventions to secure long-term impact for the prevention and early detection of disease. 

The narrative around prevention and early detection in the UK indicates that they are valued, with government strategies in each nation signalling the intention to prioritise these areas, and health services already successfully implementing a range of prevention and early detection strategies and programmes. However, there remains a huge opportunity to move the system towards prioritising the prevention of illness rather than its treatment. To make the most of this opportunity, funding must be meaningfully redistributed to support prevention, which has experienced a real-terms cut of more than 25% between 2015–2016 and 2025–2026, despite recent small rises. We are also yet to fully optimise regulation and taxation for prevention, remaining slow to adopt the benefits for areas such as obesity and alcohol in England. 

As outlined in the Life Sciences Sector Plan, the UK has real strengths in innovations such as genomics, data science and biomarkers. These areas present significant opportunities to support health systems in the shift to prevention, but require the right policy, governance and incentives to be in place to be realised. Barriers to realising innovations in prevention include the level of maturity of the technologies, challenges with accessing and linking data, unclear regulatory standards, limited workforce and system capacity and inadequate research funding and investment incentives. 

This report sets out the case for urgent action, provides evidence of the economic and health impact of prevention, reviews the current policy and innovation landscape, and outlines our intended work to unlock the transformative potential of prevention and early detection in the UK and globally.

Programme focus

Our programme will explore the policy, governance and incentive changes required for health systems to harness public health innovations and deliver sustainable, equitable and resilient population health. To do this, we will focus on the broad areas of innovation, systems, economy and inclusion, exploring the following questions as a starting point: 

• If everyone agrees that prevention is crucial, why is it still so difficult for health services to move beyond rhetoric and make it a reality?
• How can we support innovations like genomics, polygenic risk scores, and biomarkers to reach their full potential and how do we embed accountability throughout the system?
• Do current evaluation frameworks such as quality-adjusted life year (QALY)-driven approaches properly capture the full economic value of secondary prevention and early detection, or are we overlooking impacts that matter most for the health and productivity of the population?
• Do employers recognise their power to champion prevention and early detection at work, or are they missing a vital opportunity to transform workforce health?
• Will current strategies for prevention and early detection tackle health inequalities, or could they risk widening the gap?

Our approach

All countries are grappling with how to pivot health systems towards prevention, taking varied approaches and achieving different results. However, the UK has considerably higher rates of avoidable mortality than many comparable high-income countries. As part of this programme, we have commissioned an international comparative analysis exploring health prevention policy across the UK and other high-income countries to inform learning and policy dialogue. The analysis examines comparative patterns in prevention spending, preventable mortality, and policy approaches across countries to better understand how countries are responding to this shared challenge, and what the UK might learn from comparative experience.

The programme will be guided by our Oversight Group:

• Professor Philippa Saunders FMedSci, Professor of Reproductive Steroids, University of Edinburgh
• Sir Harpal Kumar FMedSci, Chief Scientific Officer & President International, GRAIL
• Professor Nadeem Sarwar, Founder and Head of the Transformational Prevention Unit, Novo Nordisk.

It will involve the convening of small time-limited Expert Groups to respond to priority areas with a clear policy mandate. These groups will be drawn from a wider pool of experts with insights from across public health, prevention, economics, life sciences innovation and policy.

Work with us

We invite stakeholders to work with us in our prevention programme. Your insights, expertise, and collaboration are vital in shaping our work to develop effective prevention and early detection strategies and to achieving meaningful improvements in population health. 

• Please reach out to [email protected] to share your perspectives as we work together to drive innovation for fairer health.

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