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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. ==References== 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「NHS health check」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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