Healthcare leaders are concerned that the restructuring of the Office for Health Improvement and Disparities (OHID), which partly replaced Public Health England in 2021, could slow down crucial work to tackle the country’s worsening health inequalities.
Large staffing cuts, the loss of senior members of staff, and the fragmentation of the organisation into three divisions were reported last week by the Health Service Journal,1 and the former Labour health minister Philip Hunt has said that OHID had “effectively been dismantled and certainly decimated.” In response, a spokesperson for the Department of Health and Social Care said this was “categorically untrue” but confirmed that there …