The cost of inaction: Why prevention can’t wait
Prevention works. It saves lives, boosts productivity, and reduces demand on overstretched health systems. Yet despite compelling evidence, prevention remains persistently undervalued and underfunded. Why?
One reason is structural. Within health budgets, prevention is often the first to be cut. Its returns are slow to materialise and typically accrue beyond the health sector, across education, employment, and the environment. That makes it a political and economic outlier, hard to prioritise in short-term budget cycles and within siloed systems of accountability.
The Change Initiative Prevention Programme, delivered in partnership with leading global actors, aims to reframe prevention as a smart, cross-sector investment in resilience. We're exploring how financing and incentives can be reshaped to reflect prevention’s true value, and how better evidence can support long-term thinking in policy and planning.
If we are serious about the sustainability of our health systems, economies, and societies, we need to break the cycle of underinvestment. That starts by asking not what prevention costs, but what failing to prevent truly means.
