FEARS were raised the new long term plan for the NHS will fail to tackle inequality and deprivation in healthcare.

Blackburn with Darwen Council leader, Cllr Mohammed Khan, said although government bosses talked about how the plan would help people in deprived communities access services, money was being taken away from public health where it was most needed.

Cllr Brian Taylor told members of the council's health and wellbeing board that public health had lost £700 million in funding nationally since 2015.

Cllr Khan said: "We are talking about prevention and tackling inequality and that's important but my concern is that government thinking is very different.

"They are talking about prevention but they are also taking money away from public health."

Chief officer of Blackburn with Darwen and East Lancashire CCGs, Julie Higgins, said the new plan would see more investment in primary care.

She added: “This supports our ambition to have people supported by their GP and neighbourhood services to keep people at home and healthy.

“It’s the first time the government has really put its back behind prevention rather than treatment. It’s an interesting dilemma because whenever the lights are on at the hospital, people will go and it costs money.

“We have got to find a way of working which means that demand goes down but if you closed A&E at 10pm people would just tip up somewhere else.

“Anyone who works in health knows you are given an amount of money to spend and an amount of things to spend it on and they never add up.

“The key for us this year, which is disappointing but I can understand, is to stabilise the hospital.

“What we need to do then is make all our systems as stable as we can. We are going to have to make some quite difficult decisions to save some money.”

The NHS Long Term Plan is a new plan for the NHS to improve the quality of patient care and health outcomes.

It sets out how the £20.5 billion budget settlement for the NHS, announced by the Prime Minister in summer 2018, will be spent over the next five years.

The plan has been developed in partnership with frontline health and care staff, patients and their families and government bosses claim it will improve outcomes for major diseases, including cancer, heart disease, stroke, respiratory disease and dementia.

It also includes measures to improve out-of-hospital care, supporting primary medical and community health services, while aiming to improve maternity safety, support older people and focus on developing digital health services.