Answering the call for a fairer deal for Europe’s patients

Opinion by EHFG President Helmut Brand and EAPM Executive Director Denis Horgan

Everybody likes to get a fair deal. Nobody wants to feel they have been over-charged or are receiving goods and services of a lower standard than their neighbour. To its credit, the European Union has worked hard to create a level playing field for all its citizens in several areas.

A notable success occurred recently in the lowering of roaming charges on mobile phones. Previously, citizens in member states were charged different, and much higher, rates when making and receiving personal or business calls while travelling abroad.

In this case, the service and standard was the same but the costs were unjustifiably higher if you happened to have your phone contract in one EU country rather than another and were also travelling outside your own borders. And were there any added benefits for the extra cost, such as voice recording or an answering service? No. The costs were simply higher because the phone companies decided it should be so.

Everyone, even the Eurosceptics, heaped praise on the EU for ending this practice and helping to keep cash in citizens’ pockets rather than in the phone companies’ bulging bank accounts.

The European Alliance for Personalised Medicine (EAPM) is pressing for the EU to take a long look at the health care sector in order to implement the ‘roaming charges philosophy’. This would greatly help to ensure a fair deal and equal access to the best treatment for its 500 million citizens spread across 28 member states.

A disease or illness is no different to a patient when he or she crosses a border, although treatment can cost more or less in a different country and may not even be available in their home nation.

We all have cheaper travel these days, allowing patients to cross borders more easily. And they certainly need to be able to do so as no one single member state will ever have all the expertise and best service in all arenas. Similarly, many countries have realized that they cannot have the best service and expertise in every region of their own nation.

To overcome this problem, some member states have set up and developed ‘centres of expertise’ thus allowing the pooling of knowledge and best practices.

EAPM believes that the EU should follow the example of these member states while acknowledging that it has begun to do so in the case of rare diseases. This is a response to the fact that treatments need to be targeted at smaller populations, as is generally the case too with personalised medicine.

The various fields vital to individualizing medicine – and delivering the right treatment to the right patient at the right time – have seen an exponential increase in scientific developments and great technological leaps. Now is the perfect time to reshape the regulatory field, shake up the way we do research and perform clinical trials, set agreed standards and implement them, and make full, ethical use of ‘Big Data’, among other things.

Europe has, this year, a new and more potent European Parliament as well as a new College of Commissioners, each in place for minimum terms of five years. Much can be achieved in that time but a longer-term view is also crucial to creating a healthier and wealthier Europe for this generation and those to come.

With its ongoing STEPs campaign (Specialised Treatment for Europe’s Patients), and the setting up of an MEPs’ STEPs Interest Group, EAPM has created a regular forum in which all stakeholders can hear what the patients want and need, and the policymakers can hear one voice. This is an essential forum for moving forward as clear messages are required to equip politicians and the Commission with the right tools to undertake the huge task ahead.

EAPM’s annual conference, on 9-10 September at the Solvay Library in Brussels’ Park Leopold, will bring together all stakeholders, from patients, clinicians and academics to industry representatives and member state affiliates, and will also include Commission officials plus new and returning MEPs.

The Alliance believes that now is the moment to mould legislation that offers the right laws, in the right place, at the right time and create a continent in which the old roaming charges-style unfairness no longer applies to any Eutopean patient in need of treatment.

‘EU, phone home…’

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