BMA chairman calls for national strategy for health

“We now need a national strategy for health and health care.” This was the challenge the chairman of the BMA council set the government in his opening address to the association's annual meeting this week.

Dr Sandy Macara said that a strategy was needed to promote the health of the nation; it was needed to support the medical and other health professions in articulating realistic targets and taking effective action, for example, to fight and win the battle against tobacco—“the greatest single preventable hazard to life and health”—and to tackle the complex problems damaging the health of young people.

The country needed a strategy, he said, to ensure that resources were allocated on the basis of relative clinical need and the quality of the outcome of care, to ensure equity of care for all. The epidemiological skills of public health doctors needed to be harnessed to this task.

A strategy was needed for the balanced development of primary, secondary, and community care, which was based on rational evolutionary changes in patterns of provision.

A strategy …