Ask anyone in health policy whether prevention is worth investing in, and the answer is almost always yes. Yet prevention remains chronically underfunded. Why?
Because the system is built that way. Prevention delivers its benefits over long time horizons, across multiple sectors, and its success is measured by something invisible: the illness that never occurs. Set against short-term, siloed budgets and the constant pull of acute care, prevention loses out by design.
This month's bulletin confronts that paradox head-on.
Convened by OHE, the Change Initiative unites partners from across industry, academia and civil society to produce rigorous, independent research on health systems' hardest problems and translate it into policy that sticks. Prevention financing is its current focus.
The project moves the debate beyond whether prevention works to the harder question of how to fund it, setting out a practical framework to Protect, Grow and Diversify investment in preventive health. In our newest podcast episode, WHO Europe's Director of Prevention and Health Promotion, Dr Gundo Weiler, and OHE's Graham Cookson ask why political choices, not the evidence, so often leave prevention and the fight against non-communicable diseases underfunded.
