Prevention Watch is a regular Scottish Health Equity Research Unit (SHERU) briefing that looks at prevention as a means of public service delivery to reduce health inequalities in Scotland. By prevention, we are referring to public policy interventions that prevent poor outcomes in the future as opposed to policies and practices that intervene to mitigate harms once they have already occurred or subsequently deal with the consequences. This principle of prevention was set out in the Christie Commission’s report on public service reform in 2011, and has framed much of the discourse on public service delivery in Scotland ever since.
In this edition we cover:
- A podcast from the University of Glasgow on ‘why prevention is so hard’
- An interview with Ivan McKee on prevention and public sector reform
- A deeper dive into homelessness prevention, featuring a toolkit for policy making from the OECD and early insights into findings from Upstream Scotland, a model for youth homelessness prevention
- 2 reports on the role of housing in recovery from addiction
- Prevention across the UK
