Covid-19: Why prioritising prevention matters in a pandemic of cures

Prevention is better than cure. Simple. Clear. Logical. Except that it is easily overcomplicated, clouded, and misplaced. When we forget that prevention is better than cure, primary care becomes an easy scapegoat, even though the pandemic has reinforced its importance in improving baseline population health, reducing health inequalities, delivering a vaccination strategy, and keeping people out of hospital. We might forget the mammoth efforts of general practice to reconfigure care—and then reverse some of that reconfiguration12—the extra burden and complexity created by limitless digital access of patients to health professionals,3 and the ingenuity and partnership now needed between primary and secondary care to clear a 4.7 million person …