Moving towards prevention – how policy calls can help the allergic community

This autumn, Allergy UK returned to Liverpool and Birmingham for the Conservative and Labour party conferences. Over two weeks, staff participated in more than two dozen fringe events, receptions and speeches, meeting with key political stakeholders and fellow third sector representatives, ensuring that allergy was always part of the political conversation.

One word dominated the healthcare space – “prevention”. From Labour fringe events discussing the future of the workforce, to Conservative receptions reviewing health policies for the future, nearly every conversation turned towards tackling the root causes of ill-health, early diagnosis and management of conditions. These discussions reviewed the government’s plans for neighbourhood health services and identified the need to ensure that, if the focus of health moved into the community, funding would follow. Stakeholders agreed that if the focus for work and care was to successfully shift from the hospital to the community, then so too would resources.

Considerations for funding for the NHS formed a key part of these discussions. Healthcare professionals we heard from agreed that prevention was far better than a cure but raised significant questions over where funding could come from, with a recent history of primary care budget being reallocated to secondary care. Despite governmental emphasis on the importance of “front door” services, speakers highlighted that between 2015 and 2025, the proportion of funding assigned to primary care had fallen from 8.8% to 8.3%, while the proportion spent on acute secondary care had increased from 38.4% to 42.6%.

Our key insight from conference season was this renewed focus, the need for more robust and effective primary care, plus the need to divert funding from secondary care, but a time when metrics of success are increasingly measured by secondary health outcomes, such as waiting lists. With NHS budget allocation a source of major contention, it was made clear than any policy proposals would have to demonstrate robust economic evidence to be credible.

For Allergy UK, and the wider allergic community, the national conversation about properly resourced prevention and a renewed focus on tackling the root causes of long-term health conditions could not be more relevant. Allergy UK has long campaigned for better primary care pathways for allergy, improving diagnostics and referrals through the introduction of nurse-led allergy clinics. These clinics would be capable of triaging suspected allergy – a cost-effective alternative to expensive and slow referrals to secondary care made by GPs without the specialist knowledge to manage cases in primary care.

Allergy is a key area with strong supportive evidence as to the value of early intervention, with timely diagnosis key to managing allergic disease before the condition worsens. With new plans for neighbourhood health centres capable of intervening in the early stages of long-term conditions, this year’s conference season found us holding strong and promising conversations with cross-party political stakeholders, advocating for genuine and long overdue change. Looking to the year ahead, Allergy UK is involved in developing health economics modelling to demonstrate the financial case for our primary care policy call. Coupled with the insights and connections from conferences, our advocacy team has strong hopes for the year to come.

Our major takeaway from conferences should give everyone working in or around the allergic community hope. From policy makers to charity representatives, pharmaceutical representatives to healthcare workers, every person we met and every conversation we held found strong support for the allergic community, with agreement that it was time for better. It is now on us to demonstrate what better will look like.