What About Now?

Our Future Health is a UK project intended to help develop healthcare systems capable of diagnosing a range of diseases in their earliest stages (https://www.theguardian.com/science/2022/oct/24/uk-scheme-to-diagnose-diseases-earlier-cancer-obesity-mental-health). It's rightly maintained that the UK's poor performance in treating some common disease conditions, is largely a consequence of diagnosis being generally too late. The Our Future Health project will eventually recruit circa 5 million people, 'from all walks of life'. This project will involve the recruits sharing their health records. Test subjects will give blood samples (for cholesterol values etc), as well as having their weights and blood pressures routinely recorded. The participant's DNA will also be analysed. The idea is to develop new diagnostic tools, based on genetics, to find early onset of disease and/or identify which individuals are at high risk. The UK's current healthcare problems are, however, rooted in the general public's relative inability to see a General Practitioner or a consultant. There are enormous backlogs for both diagnosis and treatment. The Our Future Health participants will consequently be getting a level of screening vastly superior to that available to the man (or woman) in the street. In one sense, the study hardly needs doing. Monitoring like that of the recruits, should, where possible, be routinely available to all. This is what a science-based healthcare service should look like.