New NHS boss: support should turn into world leader in personalised medicine

Simon Stevens believes the NHS could benefit from the ‘global medical revolution’ of personalised medicine. Photograph: Owen Humphreys/PA

The NHS’s new boss will on Wednesday urge the services to turn into a planet leader in personalised medication, which employs a patient’s genetic profile to devise greater remedies.

Simon Stevens, the chief executive of NHS England, will use his 1st significant policy speech to embrace the possible of what he calls an ongoing “global health-related revolution” that holds out the prospect of sufferers having a better chance of beating conditions such as cancer.

Stevens is anticipated to tell the annual conference of the NHS Confederation, at which about two,000 NHS managers will collect in Liverpool, that the NHS could benefit substantially from what he believes are “three really fundamental shifts in the practice of present day medication: a coming revolution in biomedicine, in data for high quality and proactive care, [and] in the position that individuals perform in controlling their own overall health and care”.

“The NHS has to grab these options with both hands, rather than letting them wash over us, or hoping they will bypass us so we can carry on with company as normal.” The NHS should “embrace them and harness them to our result in”, he will say in his speech on Wednesday afternoon, which will set out how the services ought to react to its growing pressures.

“A decade and a half on from the Human Genome Undertaking, we are nevertheless in the early days of the clinical payoff. But as biology becomes an details science, we are going to see the wholesale reclassification of condition aetiologies. As we are finding with cancer, what we as soon as considered of as a single issue may be dozens of distinct circumstances. So frequent diseases may in truth be extended households of quite rare ailments,” he will say.

That improvement could lead to therapies a lot better tailored to the patient’s very own genetic makeup, Stevens will include. “That will call for a lot better stratification in individualised diagnosis and treatment method. From carpet-bombing to precision focusing on. From one particular dimension fits all to a single size fits one particular. The NHS need to be at the forefront of this global health care revolution.”

Stevens, 47, took up his post on 1 April and is in charge of NHS England, which has a £95.6bn spending budget. He will announce that the organisation is inviting educating hospitals and clinical analysis centres to bid to join the new one hundred,000 genome programme, 1 of the world’s most significant efforts to date to harness the growing knowledge about people’s genetic profiles to the quest for more efficient diagnoses and therapies.

The NHS, which he desires to be “rigorously pro-science, professional-research and professional the rapid spread of beneficial improvement”, will also be “moving to a new model for regional genetics labs to upgrade and industrialise NHS abilities in this spot”, he will say.

New NHS boss: support should turn into world leader in personalised medicine