Palermo, Italy
Nov 29-30, 2023.

BEACON: Virtues can inform and transform lives and create a shift in thinking and action.

Those responsible for healthcare decisions have to have a clear view of when, how, and who to diagnose, prescribe, and treat; otherwise, the result will be a late diagnosis and innovation failing to reach patients.  And that clear view should not vary wildly from country to country. But just as virtues evolve—as the view of slavery has transitioned over two hundred years from business practice to abomination, or prescribing antibiotics for everything is now (after more than 50 years) ill-perceived—the “virtue” of the correct diagnosis is also evolving. In this transition to the virtue of correct diagnosis, views still vary, so patients suffer.

This was the purpose of the event that we held in Palermo last week that focused on an EU-funded project entitled ‘CANCER CARE BEACON: Reducing disparities across the European Union. The project aims to deliver a framework to scale current capacity and capabilities to address existing cancer disparities. The European Alliance for Personalised Medicine will bring the outcomes to European Parliamentarians and Commissions this week.

While the EU has demonstrated that it can shift opinion in relation to the environment, water policy, or energy, it has yet to achieve the same impact on health. Different views of virtue abound, healthcare suffers, and investment in health innovation is leaking out of the EU in search of more stable contexts. Improvements are made from time to time, but there is no consistency or uniformity across the Member States because often these improvements are singular-led and bring only a singular sense of achievement.

But since virtues can (and do) evolve, there is hope that good health and good healthcare could become virtues accepted by all. And it should continue evolving to accept that prenatal testing or getting sequenced as a young adult is part of healthcare.

How far can that evolution go in the face of tradition, a sense that you should be thankful for what is given, or less demanding about testing, or more accepting of fate? Should deciding against the use of less invasive diagnostics to avoid surgery be considered contrary to virtue?

The virtues that innovation can bring are justifications. As technology increasingly makes personalized healthcare more feasible, it should become widely accepted as a virtue. But this will need political support, hence our engagement with the EU institution.