Our 2024 manifesto
Launched at the House of Lords in November 2024 and published in December 2024 as Hope for the Future: Promoting a Vision of Health Professionals' Education Based on Disease Prevention and Health Creation.
Read Anglia Ruskin University's news item on the launch
Download the manifesto (PDF, 0.6 MB)
This page is a summary. The PDF has the full text, with its figures and references. If you need the manifesto in another format, email rethinkinghealth@hotmail.com.
Summary
Momentum is growing with calls for a more preventative health care model. The NHS faces pressures on both the demand and the supply side of health care. Issues including retention and recruitment challenges in the health workforce, the growing profile of ill-health with an ageing population, and substandard patient care show that the present model cannot be sustained. Visionary thinking and new models of service delivery are now necessary.
Successful and sustainable solutions will require effective mobilisation, adoption, and advocacy from health care professionals, who are still educated and trained under an industrialised model of service delivery. Better education of health care professionals and participation of the future health care workforce is therefore central to a better future of the health service.
The campaign is a necessary response to these challenges.
The manifesto has four parts:
- The case for change: disease prevention and health creation
- Why education of health professionals matters
- Our work: campaign mission, vision and actions
- Join us: improving health professionals' education
The case for change
Illness is a medical problem but often requires more than a medical solution.
Medicines, when necessary and competently prescribed, have their value in modern health systems.
Health, disease and illness occur beyond the membrane of our biology. Health is created and destroyed in houses, in communities, in our social lifestyles, in poverty and beyond. Health care professionals cannot and should not be responsible for addressing the wider determinants of health. They can, however, develop new roles in facilitating and supporting others to do so, across the whole spectrum of maintaining and creating health and preventing disease.
A future health system freed from the gap between demand and capacity starts with a health workforce trained in principles of disease prevention and advocating for health creation, recognising communities primarily as sites of health and wellbeing over hospitals.
Health care needs a rethink, from model to mechanism.
Why education matters
Current education informs future clinical practice. Changing health care requires a shift away from industrialised overmedicalisation to a clinical culture that readily implements health creation and disease prevention principles. The medical model must be expanded beyond its current biomedical limitations to adopt a holistic, biopsychosocial approach in everyday practice.
Future health care professionals can be trained as agents of change to improve patient and public health and wellbeing. They can play a role in civil society to support, advocate, and influence for health creation capacities across communities.
Our work
Part 3 of the manifesto sets out the campaign's mission: "To empower and educate the next generation of health care professionals on disease prevention and health creation principles."
It names four areas of focus and three actions, and says the campaign's long-term influence will work at three levels: school education, undergraduate education and early-career professionals' training.
Join us
Part 4 of the manifesto asks for support and engagement from all sectors of health and care. It speaks to health care professionals in training, organisations, patients and health service users, and academics and health policy makers.
Further reading
Published sources on the campaign and its case, including those behind our key figures.
- Hope for the Future (PDF, 0.6 MB), our 2024 manifesto. Rethinking Health, December 2024.
- Medical education fit for the future requires radical change. The BMJ, 16 December 2024.
- Health is made at home, hospitals are for repairs. Lord Crisp, New Local, 13 November 2020.
- What is Social Prescribing? National Academy for Social Prescribing.
- Health in 2040: projected patterns of illness in England. The Health Foundation, July 2023.
- Health inequalities in 2040. The Health Foundation, April 2024.
- Good for you, good for us, good for everybody: the National Overprescribing Review. Department of Health and Social Care, 22 September 2021.
- Rethinking Health: Hope for the Future Campaign calls for health staff training to focus on prevention as well as cure. NHS Charities Together, 11 February 2026.
