My healthy future: policy context

Science and technologies have the potential to transform the healthcare landscape over the next 20 years. Such a transformation will be directly influenced by a range of factors including the complex and inter-related challenges plaguing the UK health system, the impact of evolving drivers of change including demographics and cultural shifts, and how health policy has been developed and implemented by successive policymakers over the years.

To understand how the future of health may look, it is vitally important to understand the underlying context of health policy, and how this is reflected within our current health system, and the work of public, private and third sector organisations, and how they have shaped the current reality of healthcare.

As part of our work on the My healthy future project, which sets out a vision of the future of healthcare, PHG Foundation conducted a detailed review of the existing landscape of health policy.

PHG Foundation undertook an extensive review and analysis of key health policy documents published by a wide range of stakeholders between the early 2000s through to 2017. For existing health policy, this report relies on documents produced by national organisations such as the NHS’ Five Year Forward View, and Public Health England’s Better Outcomes by 2020.

Through analysis of these documents, PHG Foundation aims to identify the emergence and evolution of core policy themes, including those that encourage innovation and the integration of health and care. Which provides the framework for our analysis of the evolution of health policy since the early 2000s.

This report sets out the healthcare policy context from the early 2000s to 2018, and includes:

• The perceived context within which UK health systems operate
• Evolving drivers of change and their impact on UK health systems
• How health policy has developed in response to these dynamic factors