Scotland’s current health challenges are complex and go far beyond the control of the NHS, combining an ageing population, enduring inequalities, deprivation, poverty and changes in the pattern of disease. 

The NHS has an important leadership role in driving the transformation required to improve health and wellbeing in Scotland. A concerted effort to tackle the nation’s significant public health challenges is required to ensure the long-term sustainability of our public services. 

The Scottish Government and the Convention of Scottish Local Authorities (COSLA) are jointly leading a reform programme to improve health and wellbeing outcomes in Scotland. A new public health body, as well as a focus on collaboration across the whole system on an agreed set of public health priorities, underpins this reform programme.

Realising the public health priorities requires everybody across the whole of the healthcare system and wider public sector to work together in partnership. The session will set out the reform ambitions and how an innovative approach focused on prevention, reducing inequalities, collaboration and better use of data is helping to support the delivery of a public health priority aim: to create a culture in Scotland where we eat well, have a healthy weight and are physically active.

The session will outline how Scotland’s innovative public health policies are leading the way in prevention and reducing health inequalities. It will provide an opportunity to hear directly from NHS Boards working across the healthcare system to co-produce and redesign weight management services to give people with, or at risk of, type 2 diabetes better access to effective weight management services. It will also highlight how sport and physical activity contribute to improving health outcomes and how partnership working across sectors is crucial to realising these benefits in practice.