“An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure,” Benjamin Franklin’s adage goes. Yet that simple prescription has been hard to follow in the current NHS. As has been frequently highlighted, one of the biggest challenges for the health system is not just how much we spend per capita, but where and when it is spent. In England, there has been an ongoing shift within the NHS budget towards acute hospital care – treating people in hospitals, often after they are already quite ill – while funding for primary care such as GPs has fallen.

The consequence is that the NHS is increasingly paying for serious and expensive disease treatment, rather than investing upstream to prevent disease in the first place. We spend heavily on dealing with heart attacks, strokes and other life-threatening conditions, rather than identifying those who are at higher risk and intervening earlier to reduce their chances of getting ill.

So, it’s excellent news that the NHS in England will begin to offer free cholesterol tests, and the offer of a blood pressure check, in participating high street pharmacies for those aged 40 to 84. The nationwide phased rollout follows a pilot study in north London in which close to 2,500 patients were checked across 61 community pharmacies. Nineteen percent were found to be at high risk of a heart attack or stroke and were offered........

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