#Health: Leaving EU is not best plan for a healthy Britain

As every reader will know by now, the UK will hold an 'in-out' referendum on its membership of the EU on 23 June this year, writes European Alliance for Personalised Medicine (EAPM) Executive Director Denis Horgan.

The Lord Mayor of London, Boris Johnson, announced at the weekend - in the wake of his Prime Minster David Cameron’s work at last week’s summit in Brussels - that he would be backing the ‘leave’ campaign.

This came after months of Johnson delaying his decision, leading many observers to form the opinion in the last few hours that his choosing to side with the ‘out’ lobby is a cynical attempt to become the UK’s next premier.

Not everyone believes that, of course, and he certainly writes one or two nice things about his leader - “David Cameron has done his very best, and he has achieved more than many expected. There is some useful language about stopping “ever-closer union” from applying to the UK, about protecting the euro outs from the euro ins, and about competition and deregulation,” in a 2,000 word column in The Daily Telegraph.

But the two are certainly set to clash, and in fact have already, with Downing Street dismissing Johnson’s apparent suggestion there could be a second referendum if the UK votes to leave. An official spokesman reiterated Cameron’s comment that a “a vote to leave is a vote to leave”.

Elsewhere in his missive, Johnson states that: “It is time to seek a new relationship, in which we manage to extricate ourselves from most of the supranational elements.”

When it comes to the arena of health - an issue that affects a potential 500 million patients in (currently) 28 member states, (not least the 64+ million in Britain), there are very few ‘supranational elements’ because health is a competency for each individual nation.

In Britain, the past five years have seen changes to the NHS and more are now on the way, with private companies such as Virgin becoming increasingly involved in health care, not least in the field of cancer.

Also in The Daily Telegraph Erik Nordkamp, the UK head of Pfizer, one of the world’s biggest pharmaceutical companies, is on record as saying he would “not want to be a cancer patient in England”.

The managing director of the pharma giant stated that England has one of the poorest outcomes for cancer patients among the OECD club of rich nations, adding that England is also one of the worst countries in the world - if not the worst - for getting breakthrough drugs to those who need them.

OK, if you want to be cynical, for sure Nordkamp would love to sell more drugs to the NHS, but the figures don’t lie: cancer survival rates in Britain are estimated to be in excess of ten years behind those in many other European countries.

And survival rates for breast cancer, for example, languish well below the levels seen in France, Sweden and Italy before the turn of the 21st century.

He has the support of others in the know, with the Macmillan Cancer Support calling the situation ‘shameful’, not least because too many patients are dying needlessly in England when they could survive had they been treated elsewhere in Europe.

Experts said that thousands of patients would be put at risk by last year’s shake-up of the Cancer Drugs Fund, giving the medicines rationing body NICE the final say over which treatments can be offered.

Doctors and campaigners warned in early 2015 that this would restrict access to life-saving drugs due to the rejection of breakthrough treatments already available in other countries.

Nordkamp added that the government’s proposals on the above reforms would end up failing patients and “set the clock back five years”, while damning the NICE methodology of testing treatments as “not fit for purpose” .

This is in the main because expert understanding of the nature of cancer has changed, and we now know that it is hundreds of unique diseases - rather than just one - which require targeted care.

NICE aside, dark mutterings about the dismantling of the NHS have rumbled on under Cameron’s government and yet, one way or another, the UK - as with all other countries within the Union - has to tackle the issue of a population that is living longer, that needs to work for more years due to a pension trough, and one that will see individuals, in many cases, suffering from not just one but two-or-three diseases due to their advancing age.

The Brussels-based European Alliance for Personalised Medicine (EAPM) is firmly of the belief that, in the UK and elsewhere, the integration of this exciting new form of treatment, based largely on the use and application of the genetic sciences, offers the best chance of giving the right treatment to the right patient at the right time. 

This will enhance the quality of life of a patient (and in many cases save it), keep him or her out of expensive hospitals and surgeries, and extend the ability of a citizen to work and, therefore, contribute to the economy. 

Following the undeniable failure of a one-size-fits-all mentality in which doctors treat by population averages rather than by the individual (including his or her lifestyle choices), the personalised medicine approach is the only realistic way forward.

To foster this, there is clearly a need for ‘more’ not ‘less’ Europe when it comes to healthcare, and not only in the UK. Individual countries must play a major part at national level and it is obvious that there is a need for much more cross-border collaboration in several areas. 

These include, but are not exclusive to, the gathering, storage and sharing of Big Data, the running of effective clinical trials in rare diseases (with, by definition, smaller groups in each country or regions of a country), education of health-care professionals in the emerging treatments becoming available, investment in research and much more co-operation between different disciplines, within and between Member States, in order to encourage innovation and decrease duplication.

One of the key tenets of the EU is the improvement of the lives of its citizens and billions of euro are being poured annually into, for example, research into cures for illnesses.

More collaboration means more sharing of resources, which will allow for the improvement of healthcare systems.

The EU prides itself on striving for equality and, as mentioned, improving the lives of all of its citizens. Statistics can be used to illustrate many things, and it is certainly possible to find some that strongly suggest that the UK is letting down its people in some healthcare respects.

If it cannot keep up in the age of modern medicine even within a united Europe, how does it expect to manage all by itself? Something to ponder, Mr Johnson.

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