NHS health checks are available to people in England between the ages of 40 and 74. The health check consist of an appointment with a healthcare professional at which people are asked about their family history and lifestyle and have their body mass index, blood pressure, and cholesterol concentration measured. Further investigations may then follow.
in January 2008, the then prime minister, Gordon Brown, announced “everyone in England will have access to the right preventative health check-up . . . there will soon be check-ups on offer to monitor for heart disease, strokes, diabetes, and kidney disease.” He also pledged a national screening committee, an independent clinical body, that “will look at the evidence and advise on what additional screening procedures would be genuinely useful in detecting other conditions.”
Every local authority in England is obliged to secure the provision of health checks to be offered to eligible persons (aged from 40 to 74 years) in its area.
The programme of health checks has been criticised as being without evidence of effectiveness by Dr Margaret McCartney. The director of the UK National Screening Committee is reported as saying “There are certainly some aspects of the programme that look and feel like screening. However it is not run as a systematic ‘call-recall’ programme nor does it have quality assurance". John Ashton, president of the Faculty of Public Health, said he has “grave reservations” about health checks. “We are not convinced about the evidence base. There is a danger of medicalising social inequalities—in many ways health checks could be seen as playing into the pharmaceutical agenda. We should be focusing on disadvantaged communities—not finding more worried well.”
In September 2014 Professor Kevin Fenton, head of health and wellbeing at Public Health England, claimed the programme was being run on sound principles and rejected calls from to change track and focus on more opportunistic checking in people known to be at high risk. A study published in the British Journal of General Practice found no significant differences in the change to the prevalence of diabetes, hypertension, Chronic Heart Disease, Chronic Kidney Disease or Atrial Fibrillation in GP practices providing NHS Health Checks compared with control practices.
Peter Walsh, deputy director of the Strategy Group at NHS England admitted that take-up of the checks was poor in January 2016, after a study showed that 20% of those eligible aged 60-74 attended and 9.0% of those between 40–59.
In May 2016 researchers from Imperial College London concluded that the checkup reduced the 10-year risk of cardiovascular disease by 0.21%, equivalent to one stroke or heart attack avoided every year for 4,762 people who attend. The programme cost £165 million a year.
A retrospective observational study by the Centre for Primary Care and Public Health, Queen Mary University of London found that take up in an ethnically diverse and socially deprived area of East London had increased from 7.3% of eligible patients in 2009 to 85.0% in 2013–2014. New diagnoses of diabetes were 30% more likely in attendees than nonattendees, hypertension 50%, and Chronic Kidney Disease 80%.