#EAPM - Summer school aims to boost modern health-care education

Time is moving quickly towards the European Alliance for Personalised Medicine’s third annual summer school for young health-care professionals, with registration open here, where you can also find more information on the event, writes European Alliance for Personalised Medicine (EAPM) Executive Director Denis Horgan.

This year’s school will be held in Warsaw, Poland, from 19-22 June, hosted in conjunction with the Polish Alliance for Personalized Medicine, and also in co-operation with the Maria Skłodowska-Curie Memorial Cancer Centre and Institute of Oncology in the Polish capital.

Titled 'New Horizons in Personalised Medicine' it comes under EAPM’s TEACH banner (Training and Education for Advanced Clinicians and HCPs), first launched in Cascais, Portugal, in 2016, and followed up in Bucharest, Romania, last year. It is an ongoing initiative that aims to educate young doctors in the latest developments of personalised medicine.  To register, please click here.

As Beata Jagielska, the president of the Polish Alliance, has put it: “The concept of personalised medicine has been recently rising in usage around the world. The belief that the number of personalised therapy recipients should increase is also growing in line with the principle of equal access to quality health care for all citizens.”

She added: “The summer school is aimed at doctors aged 28-40. Its most important goal is to bring the young specialists up-to-date with the latest news and discoveries…which in the future will help them to better understand their patients and thus select optimal therapies.”

Across the four days, HCPs will attend lectures and workshops devoted to radiology, oncology, surgical oncology, haematology, molecular biology, plus personalised medicine in combination with immunotherapy, colorectal cancer therapy and molecular diagnostics.   The school offers an opportunity to meet outstanding Polish and international specialists, who will be conducting classes for young guest specialists.

Once again, the faculty has been chosen from medical academic, clinical, communication and research specialists and will cover, among many other topics, challenges and multidimensional implications in respect of personalised medicine.

Formats will include round tables, keynote speeches, plus detailed discussions on personalised medicine and its different perspectives.

The TEACH events are part of one of many key developments that EAPM and its partners are involved in (and driving forward) to bring innovation into health-care systems across the European Union.

This year, each of the participants will receive 26 educational points as part of the continuing medical education, or CME, process.

The last two editions provided a highly interactive forum for sharing ideas for innovation, and practicing communication skills. These allowed attendees to enhance their knowledge of personalised medicine and its potential, as well as offering feedback about the priorities Europe should be zooming in on down the line.

In the changing world of health care in the EU, which of course includes the exciting new developments in personalised medicine, the ongoing education of healthcare professionals has, so far, been under-emphasized.

The true potential of all of this fantastic new science, built around genetic profiling and individual DNA, will never be fully realized unless front-line clinicians have the knowledge and understanding to exploit it.

Not only that, but relationships between health-care professionals and patients will be key.

Given that health care is a member state competence under the Treaties, the question often arises about the role that the EU can play in the ongoing education of health care professionals.

Experience has shown that no single country can go it alone. Medical science is moving too quickly and, while ongoing translational education has to be member-state driven, the EU needs to step up its role as a facilitator.

Background on EAPM HCP Education activities

On HCP education generally, EAPM has already called for action at EU level, saying that the European Union should support the development of a Europe-wide education and training curriculum for the personalised medicine era.

The Alliance also believes that the EU should subsequently facilitate the development of an Education and Training Strategy for HCPs in personalised medicine.

EAPM and all connected with the organization are working hard to promote dialogues, encourage the required platform and, as stated, calling for swift EU action. Meanwhile, the Alliance and stakeholders are playing their part, as are all attendees and faculty, with the annual Summer School.

Essentially, EAPM, its stakeholders and international affiliates believe that the issue of translational education of HCPs is a major one as the relentless march of science transforms health care.

It is clear that a great degree of up-skilling is already required and, to keep pace with the science, this must be ongoing.

Stakeholders need to achieve this together - with agreed-on standards across the board so that no patient is denied a suitable, virtually tailor-made treatment due to a lack of knowledge or understanding on behalf of the health-care professional treating and diagnosing him or her.

A key partner in tackling this is the health-care community, and one way to achieve the goal is through increased EU-wide investment in translational education and training of health-care professionals.  See this article on Translational Education for more detail published in Biomedhub.

Meanwhile, the involvement of universities, societies and research houses will be key, across all of Europe.

What is abundantly clear is that the way in which healthcare is delivered to the patient is changing and changing fast. Advances in personalised medicine will and must fundamentally alter the scope, content and manner in which healthcare professionals are trained and educated.

To move forward in any significant manner, the education of health-care professionals in personalised medicine must be placed on the policy and political agenda as a priority and matter of urgency.

If this fails to occur, the result will be a scarcity of the health-care professional capital needed to support the implementation of personalised medicine. The subsequent lack of knowledge and skills will bring about delays in its delivery, to the detriment of patients across Europe.

All health-care professionals in close contact with patients or their families need to possess a solid knowledge of the current aspects of personalised medicine and its latest breakthroughs, in order to better understand patients' concerns.

These professionals are being asked to move beyond traditional reactive medicine towards proactive health-care management, employing screening, early treatment, and prevention, and to classify and treat diseases in a new way, interpreting information from across sources that blur the traditional boundaries of individual specialties.

One stakeholder survey supported undertaken by EAPM flagged up that a lack of training and knowledge is one of the biggest barriers blocking the full integration of personalised medicine today.

It is, therefore, vital to develop training for professionals whose disciplines are essential to the successful development of personalised medicine, in order to promote the shared understanding and collaborative development of necessary tools.

So join us in Warsaw and help to play your part in a much-needed educational revolution.

Please see the TEACH Summer School website.