Professor Dame Sally Davies’s tenth report as Chief Medical Officer, published just before Christmas 2018, examines the strategic opportunities over the coming two decades for the health of the nation. The report includes a detailed look at how principles for changing behaviour to improve health and reduce health inequalities could be applied, authored by Professor Dame Theresa Marteau, James McGowan, Martin White and others.

Their chapter brings together the latest evidence on effective interventions to reduce unhealthy behaviours with a set of recommendations seeking to alter the environmental factors that exert the greatest influence on our behaviours.

We examine how changes in many aspects of the complex, interrelated environments that we inhabit could lead to a step-change in prevention and population health in England, enabling everyone to live longer in good health. By providing leadership and focusing collective efforts on effective ways of changing environments in order to change health-related behaviours, policy-makers have a unique opportunity to make England a world leader in prevention, securing major improvement to health for all and in dramatically reducing health inequalities by 2040″

– Theresa Marteau, lead author for Changing Behaviour for a Healthier Population, Annual Report of the CMO, 2018

 

Read the Annual Report of the CMO, 2018

Read Chapter Eight, Changing Behaviour for a Healthier Population

Contact and queries at PCU: Lucy Lloyd