Pressing the case for Home Artificial Nutrition to a new Labour leadership – Home Artificial Nutrition (HAN) Awareness Week - 3-9 August 2026 

Home Artificial Nutrition (HAN) Awareness Week raises awareness of everyone living with Home Artificial Nutrition and recognising the families, carers, healthcare professionals and service providers who support these life-saving treatments. This year's HAN Week, taking place 3-9 August 2026, comes at time of considerable uncertainty as to the future vision of health and social care with a new Prime Minister and a new Health Secretary. 

Both Andy Burnham and Yvette Cooper have made clear that adult social care is an area where the political focus will increase. Cooper identified taking forward social care plans as one of her first priorities on her appointment as Health and Social Care Secretary and as Health Secretary in 2010, the Prime Minister published proposals for a National Care Service and has argued that social care should have equivalent status to the NHS.  

With his background as Mayor of Greater Manchester, a leading example of health devolution and population-health reform with a strong focus on prevention and early intervention, the Prime Minister is also likely to give more freedom to local areas to shape their local services, working in partnership across health, care, local councils and beyond. 

The Ten Year Health Plan, and its commitment to a new Neighbourhood Health Service, providing far more care in local communities and also the extension of virtual wards which allow hospital level treatment and care in people’s homes, is likely to continue to shape the future of health and care provision.  

This is a vital basis for enabling more and more patients to be able to receive nutritional support at home, preventing hospital admissions and allowing speedier discharge back home. 

The number of people supported to receive nutrition or fluid via tube at home is increasing, in the UK it is estimated about 40,000 people rely on tube feeding (British Association for Parenteral and Enteral Nutrition, 2022). 

Over the last forty years, BSNA members have provided nutritional care and treatments including tube feeding, parenteral nutrition, Outpatient Parenteral Antimicrobial Therapy (OPAT) and chemotherapy at home, working with partners across the NHS and organisations such as PINNT (Patients on Intravenous and Naso-gastric Nutrition Treatment), to ensure all patients have appropriate access to the products they need. 

Yet, as PINNT (www.pinnt.com), the charity supporting people who rely on home artificial nutrition and their families, points out – HAN is a life-saving, life-changing treatment, yet it remains largely unrecognised. BSNA continues to support HAN Week as an opportunity to recognise the value of HAN and the need to integrate its provision into local health and care planning to give those who rely on it, the care and quality of life they deserve.