The NHS Health Check and mortality: do they help people live longer?

Today, we’re speaking to Dr Jasjot Saund, a public health registrar based in London.

Title of paper: Association of the NHS Health Check with all-cause mortality: a longitudinal cohort study in primary care

Available at: https://doi.org/10.3399/BJGP.2025.0451

The NHS Health Check (NHS-HC) has been shown to improve detection and management of surrogate markers of health, such as blood pressure and cholesterol. The long-term impact, however, is less evidenced, with mortality reductions seen in a UK Biobank cohort and no mortality reduction seen in a Cochrane review of general health checks, including those outside the UK. The current study added real-world evidence from a diverse UK urban population, and a 15-year study period. Survival analysis of GP electronic health record data shows reduced mortality in those who attended an NHS-HC compared with those who did not. These findings should be interpreted cautiously given the observational nature of the study design.

Transcript

This transcript was generated using AI and has not been reviewed for accuracy. Please be aware it may contain errors or omissions.

Speaker A

00:00:01.440 - 00:00:58.570

Hi and welcome to BJGP Interviews. I'm Nada Khan and I'm the senior research editor of the Journal. Thanks for taking the time today to listen to this podcast.

In today's episode, we're talking to Dr. Jazjot Sound, a public health registrar based in London.

We're here to discuss the paper she's recently published here in the BJGP titled Association of the NHS Health Check with All Cause Mortality, A Longitudinal Cohort Study in Primary Care. So thanks very much for joining us here today, Jazja.

It's really great to talk about this work and I think just before we get into the study itself, we know that NHS health checks are something that most GPs will probably be very familiar with, but maybe we don't always stop and think about the evidence behind them. So, just to start off, I wonder if you can explain to us a little bit about, about what the NHS Health Check program is actually designed to do.