Securing the Future: planning health and care for every generation

A new settlement for health and care or ‘Care Covenant’, underpinned by Future Care Guarantees, will offer greater security for everyone in society. We need political consensus upon our direction of travel – a long-term plan to guide the policies of successive governments to improve health and care outcomes, and enable individuals to plan ahead. We will, otherwise, remain forever in ‘fire-fighting’ or ‘crisis’ mode rather than on the front-foot. Whilst some have called for an independent OBR-style check on health and care spend, we believe it pertinent to first ask:

• Where are we trying to get to?
• To what extent can we plan ahead?
• How might any national plan for health and care in future underpin a political consensus – one capable of cementing public support for any increase in and targeting of spend in the years to come?

We invited leaders from the public, private and third sectors to help us explore this terrain in more depth. Their contributions to our report outline what developments we might expect in 5, 10- and 15-years’ time and, in doing so, point toward how we might plan to impact different determinants of well-being in the short, medium and longer-term.