Keeping people well, not just treating them when they're ill.

Rethinking Health is a UK campaign to make prevention, health creation and patient partnership central to health care education. We bring together health care professionals in training, educators, patients and system leaders to build a health service that helps people stay well and recover well.

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Two women sit at a picnic table in a park, laughing and holding cups of tea

Our story

Health care in the UK is built mainly to treat illness once it arrives. Services are stretched, and more people are living with long-term conditions.

In 2024, people training across the health professions launched Rethinking Health at the House of Lords. Our manifesto made a simple case: health care education should treat keeping people well as seriously as treating illness.

Since then we have argued for it in The BMJ, brought health leaders together at a House of Lords round table, published our Charter and built a network of Champions across the UK and Ireland.

Our purpose

To rethink health care so that keeping people well stands equal to treating illness, starting with how health care professionals are educated.

Health professionals are trained in depth to diagnose and treat disease. They are taught far less about what keeps people well and helps them recover: food, movement, sleep, company, purpose and community.

Why this matters

Our aims

Our three aims draw on our Charter for Champions and Advocates (June 2026). Champions commit to its six principles, set out below.

  1. Reframe Health

    Make prevention and health creation the default.

    Put prevention first, and recognise that health is made at home, in communities and in daily life, not only in health care settings.

    Practise whole-person care.

    Care for the whole person: body, mind and circumstances all shape how people stay well and recover.

  2. Reimagine Practice

    Share power and responsibility for health.

    Work with patients and communities as partners: design care and teaching with them, and support people to make decisions about their own health.

    Act on health inequalities through partnership.

    Tackle the causes of unequal health, working across professions, sectors and communities to reach the people care too often misses.

  3. Rebuild the System

    Transform education and spread what works.

    Build health creation and prevention into how every health care professional is trained, and share what already works.

    Advocate for a future-fit health system.

    Speak up for a health system that prevents illness, treats people fairly and is rooted in communities.

Our focus

We start with the four areas of our 2024 manifesto, in our order of priority.

  • Health creation

    Enabling communities to thrive, not just survive.

    Lord Nigel Crisp describes it as "creating the conditions for people to be healthy and helping them to be so".

    We believe health creation should be to the NHS what wealth creation is to the economy.

    Core concepts

  • Disease prevention

    Tackling root causes, reducing unnecessary prescribing.

    Prevention includes social prescribing, which connects people to support beyond medicine. We start a step earlier, by helping people live well before they become ill.

  • Patient-partnered care

    Listening to lived experience and valuing testimony.

    Learning from patients' own accounts of illness improves their experience of care.

  • Addressing health inequalities

    Closing gaps in access, outcomes, and opportunities.

    Understanding why illness falls unequally, and how fairer access to care can address it.

Our actions

We do the work in three ways, and each covers all four areas.

  • A movement of health care professionals in training

    Developing Champions who spread health creation and prevention through education across the system.

    Champions take all four areas into their own universities, with talks and workshops on prevention, health creation, patient partnership and equity.

    Read about our Champions

  • Education and evidence

    Gathering and sharing the case studies, insights and curricula that make health creation and prevention part of training and assessment.

    We give Champions training and slides for teaching all four areas, and research whether curricula cover prevention, safe prescribing and patient partnership.

  • Strategic partnerships

    Bringing regulators, universities, policy makers, professional bodies and system leaders together to make the change last.

    We are building partnerships with health schools, NHS trusts and community organisations, so that all four areas take root in training.

    We are inviting organisations across health and care to work with us on the education of health professionals.

    Organisations and funders

How it fits together

Each level feeds the one above it: three actions serve four areas of focus, which carry three aims towards one purpose.

  1. Our purpose

  2. Our aims

    1. Reframe Health
    2. Reimagine Practice
    3. Rebuild the System

  3. Our focus

  4. Our actions

Campaign so far

What the campaign has done since 2024.

  1. Launch at the House of Lords

  2. An article in The BMJ

  3. Round table at the House of Lords

  4. Our Charter

  5. to

    Champions in universities

All news and updates

Our 2024 manifesto

Better health care starts with better education.

Read the manifesto