"We do have interventions that can prevent people deteriorating," he says. "Are we catching everybody we need to? No not by a long way. Is there still room for improvement with the interventions? Yes. But you’re never going to have a perfect situation, and that is the state of all areas in the health system. If we intervened at the age of 30 with people smoking, we"d have less lung cancer, and we"d have less heart disease later on. So there’s got to be a bit of realism in there as well."