#EAPM: Health care needs ‘more Europe’ to improve patient access

Access to optimal health care across the 28 member states of the European Union has often been to be varied and inequitable, and of serious concern to an ageing population now suffering, in a growing number, from more than one disease.  This we know well, writes European Alliance for Personalised Medicine (EAPM) Executive Director Denis Horgan.

But what about the (albeit shrinking) younger population - the 20-50 year-olds - who in most cases, can expect to stay healthy longer? Is access an issue? Do they even care?

Well, if they don’t, they should. Many countries aim to make health insurance obligatory - and if you don’t have it, any problems, even with something as common as the need for dentistry or laser-treatment for eyesight, can cost a huge amount of money to sort out.

For those who do not earn a great deal, insurance is a no-go area financially and the best they can do is cross their fingers

Alternatively, some countries (take the UK, for example) have health services ‘freely available’ to those who cannot afford to go ‘private’. However, Britain’s National Health Service (NHS) is coming under increasing pressure and, in the current climate and with the addition of Brexit (potentially lost foreign doctors and nurses etc), looks unsustainable.

In Britain there are already huge waiting lists for things such as hip or knee operations, and even getting a non-emergency appointment with a GP can often take weeks. This will not get better any time soon, despite the now disproven pledges on the side of a referendum ‘battle bus’ and from the mouths of the ‘Leave’ contingent that £350 million extra per week will be made available to the NHS post-Brexit.

The kickback against society of long waiting times, a lack of the best drugs available (in, say, cancer treatment), inadequate implementation of cross-border healthcare, a shortage of hospital beds and other barriers is huge, leading to loss of quality of life for citizens and even loss of life itself.

On top of this, it is an unpalatable fact that smokers tend to be looked at as though lung cancer treatment should not be a priority for them, as it is their “own fault”. Hence a lack of screening programmes

Government, politicians and society in general often pay lip-service to reducing smoking, while retaining all the tax that pours in from the inevitable hike in prices that results in such efforts.

The tobacco lobby often does the rest, leading for many thinkers (but perhaps not enough) to argue that tobacco production should be banned, plain and simple, rather than going for a bottom-up solution that puts the onus on the consumer. Most finance ministers, unsurprisingly, are not buying into that argument.

But, of course, health care is not just a European problem. Across the Atlantic, in the United States of America, President Donald Trump recently suggested that the federal government should not have to deal with the likes of the knee and back problems of its citizens, but should instead focus on issues such as foreign affairs. So who picks up the slack? Essentially where should the responsibility for health care lie?

The Brussels-based EAPM would argue that, instead of health being a ‘local’ competence, it should ideally be supra-national (ie at EU level). While this is impossible given the treaties (healthcare is a Member State competence), ‘more EU’ would surely help to ensure a level playing field for the bloc’s current 500 million potential patients.

Health care needs modernizing and, while top-down legislation on clinical trials, IVDs and data protection and sharing has helped in recent times, arguably the EU should be doing more from a centralized point, at the very least in encouraging the EU-28 to share more information on health from data banks, co-operate more fully, get out of their specialist silos, work to avoid research duplication and so on, for the benefit of the citizenry.

This is just one of the topics to be addressed at EAPM’s major, four-day personalised medicine Congress in Belfast at the end of November.

This will be the first ever pan-European, multi-disciplinary Congress specific to the fast-moving field of personalised medicine and it will take place from 27-30 November.

Entitled ‘Personalising Your Health: A Global Imperative!’, it will be held in partnership with Queen’s University Belfast and Visit Belfast.

EAPM believes that Europe needs to build better health-care systems for its 500 million citizens. If we build it, they will come.

The ‘they’ in this context are multi-stakeholders in this brave new world of genetics, imaging, cutting-edge IVDs and more.

The plan is to create a better health-care future for all Europeans through shared decision making and cooperation.

A key aim of the Congress is to allow cross-fertilization between the different disease and policy areas, allowing delegates to gain a greater depth of knowledge into barriers in the field of personalised medicine.

It is also geared towards offering up valuable evidence and stakeholder opinion on which policy makers can base their decision making on how better to integrate personalised medicine into the EU’s healthcare services.

The event at the Belfast Waterfront venue will provide the biggest ‘space’ to date to allow for such a meeting of minds and expertise.

EAPM aims to build a one-stop-shop for top-level discussion and the formulation of real action plans. More information is available here.

Share this article: