Good morning, health colleagues, and welcome to the first European Alliance for Personalised Medicine (EAPM) update of the week – we have news of an upcoming EAPM event in September that will take place during the ESMO Congress, writes EAPM Executive Director Denis Horgan.
‘The need for change’
The conference, EAPM’s ninth annual event, is entitled ‘The need for change – and how to make it happen: Defining the health-care ecosystem to determine value’. The event will take place on Friday, 17 September from 08h30–16h30 CET; here is the link to register and here is the link to the agenda.
High-level speakers and attendees will come from a wide range of stakeholder groups including patients, health-care professionals, academics, industry representatives, politicians and legislators, the media and more. Since the opportunity clearly exists for input into EU thinking, what input should be made in the field of cancer? The most obvious need, given the current level of fragmentation of policy and practice, is for a new degree of coherence…
But coherence is not enough. A top-down imposition of new rules cannot be the answer if the essence of the EU’s concern – the welfare of its citizens – is to have priority. The oft-cited mantra of patient-centred healthcare must also be given real meaning, and that implies a careful and thoughtful complement of bottom-up thinking too…
