From evidence to impact: making prevention stick (In-person)

The UK faces a profound health challenge. More people are living with long-term illness, health inequalities remain stubbornly wide, and demand for health and care continues to grow. Yet alongside these pressures comes a rare opportunity.

With Rt Hon Andy Burnham MP now Prime Minister, prevention has the opportunity to move to the centre of the national conversation. As a former Health Secretary and Mayor of Greater Manchester, Burnham has long argued that improving health requires more than treating illness. Speaking at the King’s Fund in September 2025 he also reflected on Greater Manchester’s health devolution journey, and creating the conditions for people to live healthier lives.

So how do we seize this opportunity and make prevention a genuine priority, can a government committed to prevention finally deliver the long-promised shift from treating illness to creating health? Can devolution, neighbourhood health and community-led approaches succeed where previous reforms have struggled? And how do we ensure that prevention survives periods of financial, political and operational pressure?

Sessions will explore:

• What a new political era means for prevention, and whether a Prime Minister who has championed prevention, devolution and population health can help turn decades of ambition into lasting change.
• What we can learn from some of the UK's most significant prevention successes, including action on tobacco control and teenage pregnancy, and what these examples tell us about sustaining change when political priorities and public pressures shift.
• How communities, neighbourhoods and devolved leaders are reshaping prevention, and what place-based approaches and devolution are teaching us about creating health, reducing inequalities and acting earlier to prevent ill health.
• how poverty and the cost‑of‑living crisis shape health outcomes across the life course
• What leaders should do next to make prevention stick, hearing from voices across England, Scotland and Wales, including those leading Greater Manchester's Prevention Demonstrator, Public Health Scotland and the Future Generations Commissioner for Wales, on what is working, where progress is being made, and what should be prioritised over the coming years.

Hear from leading voices on prevention, including Lord Bethell, Paul Johnston, Dr Charlotte Refsum, Adam Memon and Marie Brousseau-Navarro.

Through keynote talks, panel discussions and interactive breakouts, we will examine what works, what gets in the way and what leaders need to do next. Together, we will explore what it would take to turn political ambition into lasting change and move prevention from aspiration to reality.