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National funding of public health should be protected to improve the population's health and reduce future demand, allowing the NHS to be more sustainable in the long term, peers have been told.
England's chief medical officer, Sally Davies, told the committee on the long term sustainability of the NHS that prevention was a good way of ensuring that the NHS had a long term future, during an evidence session on 20 December for the peers' inquiry into the future of the NHS.
In the light of public health budget cuts nationally and locally, peers asked whether it was time to be more robust about protecting resources allocated to public health and prevention programmes.
Davies said, "I have asked for continued ringfencing for the public health budget. In times of austerity, there are very difficult decisions, and what central government feels is that local...