Precision Medicine and Personalised Care
In 2019, Jane Wilcock, a GP in Salford, wrote an opinion piece in the British Medical Journal: “As healthcare professionals we talk about personalised care, person-centred care, personalised medicine, individualised care and precision medicine.These have distinct meanings, but are often confused as the same thing.” In reading through this article and many other publications - it becomes clear that a key point in definition revolves around the use of the words “medicine” and “care”. Where terms include the word ‘medicine’ they focus on the purely biological aspects of disease - genetics, genomics and the environmental / lifestyle aspects of a condition, at cellular level. The US National Cancer Institute, defines personalised medicine as “a form of medicine that uses information about a person's own genes or proteins to prevent, diagnose, plan treatment, find out how well treatment is working, or make a prognosis.” Through applying the increased understanding of the molecular mechanism of diseases, precision medicine aims to improve treatment developments, patient selection and outcomes, In other words, it can enable us to group together those patients who would best benefit from a specific treatment. Where the word ‘care’ is used, the focus is on psychosocial and wider aspects - the ‘preferences, needs, and values’ of an individual, and how these may influence healthcare decision- making. It is meant “to give people more choice and control in their lives”, “providing care that is respectful of and responsive to them.”
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