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Boiler on Prescription in Sunderland: Margaret and John Boulton
Boiler on prescription in Sunderland: Margaret and John Boulton, recipients of a boiler and other energy saving measures - such as new radiators and double glazing, on prescription from Sunderland clinical commissioning group. Photograph: Gentoo
Boiler on prescription in Sunderland: Margaret and John Boulton, recipients of a boiler and other energy saving measures - such as new radiators and double glazing, on prescription from Sunderland clinical commissioning group. Photograph: Gentoo

Ed Davey announces £3m for 'boilers on prescription' scheme

This article is more than 9 years old

Plan to eventually roll out scheme across England to let GPs prescribe boilers, insulation and double glazing to fuel-poor patients

The UK government is preparing a national programme for doctors to prescribe boilers, insulation and double glazing to fuel-poor patients suffering from diseases exacerbated by cold homes.

The energy secretary Ed Davey will on Tuesday announce £3m funding to fund preparatory work on the scheme across England aspart of the government’s fuel poverty strategy. He said health secretary Jeremy Hunt was supportive of the scheme.

Cold weather is estimated to cost the NHS £1.5bn a year. About 9,300 Britons died prematurely during the 2012-13 winter due to cold homes.

“Talking to GPs and other health professionals, they get frankly fed up when they’re just dealing with the symptoms and not the root causes,” said Davey. “This all costs money, huge amounts of money, dealing with the blooming symptoms. I want to deal with the root causes. Why hasn’t this been done before. I am absolutely furious that people have not done this before.”

“For me this is a no brainer. But I want to create the evidence from the research and from the pilots to show this is a complete no brainer,” said Davey.

The £3m will be used to build systems that help doctors decide quickly and easily whether patients would qualify for home improvements.

Davey said the trial would build on knowledge gathered from 73 small schemes currently running around the country, including a successful pilot programme in Sunderland which was completed last month and slashed GP and outpatients visits by a third.

About 2.4m households in the UK fall below the poverty line after paying energy bills. Many more live in excessively cold homes. Cold exacerbates a huge range of health issues, including asthma, bronchitis, heart and lung disease, kidney disease and mental health problems.

“The studies that have been done before trying to involve GPs have been beset with problems of making the process itself too complex,” said Royal College of General Practitioners vice chair of external affairs, Dr Tim Ballard. He has developed an algorithm that will alert doctors when a patient has a set of symptoms that could qualify them for the scheme. It will also take into account their postcode and living circumstances.

“I believe it will be replicable across the whole of the UK and I think that it is a really exciting opportunity,” said Ballard. “This is a fundamental shift to say it is legitimate to spend the health pound upstream to tackle these health inequalities, to give people a healthier life so they don’t become sick in the first place.”

Davey said he has the support of the health secretary and the health budget would contribute to the national expansion of the programme on completion of a successful trial.

“We want to liberate health spending to deal with the root causes of ill health, not deal with the symptoms,” said Davey. “I’ve met Jeremy Hunt to talk about it, we’ve had a group of officials working across Whitehall. This is quite exciting stuff.”

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