New long-term plan launched by UK Prime Minister Theresa May uses Global Burden of Disease study to set priorities

SEATTLE – UK Prime Minister Theresa May’s new NHS Long Term Plan, a 10-year blueprint for health services, relies substantially on the Global Burden of Disease (GBD) study to frame priorities for tackling premature death and disability. Her plan includes strengthening prevention efforts, tackling health inequalities, and improving overall quality of care over the next decade.

The National Health Service (NHS), using GBD estimates, identified smoking, alcohol use, obesity, and air pollution as key priorities.

The GBD findings “confirm that the Plan needs to stick with and make further advances on our current improvement agenda for cancer, mental health, multi-morbidity, and healthy ageing including dementia, while intensifying the NHS’ focus on children’s health, cardiovascular and respiratory conditions, and learning disability and autism, amongst others,” according to the plan.

“We established the Global Burden of Disease study more than 25 years ago with the aim of one day informing funding and programming priorities at local, regional, and national levels,” said Dr. Christopher Murray, Co-Principal Investigator of the study and Director of the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) at the University of Washington. “The use of GBD findings in the NHS Long Term Plan represents a milestone toward the achievement of this goal.”

The GBD study on which the NHS plan relies – “Changes in health in the countries of the UK and 150 English Local Authority areas 1990–2016: a systematic analysis for the Global Burden of Disease Study 2016” – was published last October in the international medical journal The Lancet.

Media contacts:

[email protected]

About the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation

The Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) is an independent global health research organization at the University of Washington that provides rigorous and comparable measurement of the world’s most important health problems and evaluates the strategies used to address them. IHME is committed to transparency and makes this information widely available so that policymakers have the evidence they need to make informed decisions on allocating resources to improve population health.

About the Global Burden of Disease study

The Global Burden of Disease (GBD) study is the largest and most comprehensive effort to quantify health loss across places and over time. It draws on the work of more than 3,600 collaborators from 145 countries and territories. The Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation coordinates the study. The GBD 2017 study was published in November 2018 and covers 359 diseases and injuries, and 84 risk factors.