News from nowhere

Exercise makes you healthy, so exercise! Her Majesty’s government is keen for you to keep away from its dwindling health service, and wants to encourage you to tone up your heart and lungs. Its usual approach would be to exhort the citizenry — which costs nothing — and set targets for the health professionals to do the same. By the year 1996, for example, 50 per cent of adults will have had counselling about exercise from their general practitioners. Computer software will need amending to carry data about jogging, swimming and brisk walking, practice nurses will have yet another task to fit into their day, and public health doctors will need to add another page of histograms to their reports.

But this time something has changed. Heart disease prevention and falls by elderly people may be suitable themes for production targets, but exercise promotion apparently is not. The rumours circulating around the Department of Health are clear that no targets will be set for exercise promotion, not even vague ones. Exercise must simply be ‘encouraged’.

This change of tactic coincides with a lavish conference sponsored by the DoH and held at one of those seven star hotels that charge £200 a night and £2.50 for a glass of orange juice. Learned exercise experts were flown in from the USA and Australia to present their wisdom to assembled DoH mandarins, making the Department’ s central expenditure a suitable case for investigation by the Audit Office.

The junket must have been memorable, because the next thing to happen was the collapse of target setting. This is sensible. The whole targeting approach is quaintly stalinist, and prone to all the failings of a five year plan, plain lying about target achievement being the most obvious. Since the other targets set by the DoH are - in the main - not being met, why add another? The question is, will this sensible approach spread, with quiet deletion of targets from DoH thinking about The Health of the Nation? healthmattershopes so, and encourages its readers to promote this change in any way possible.