Today the UK’s National Health Service celebrates its 60^th anniversary.  The media is awash with editorial comment on the health of the nation’s health service.

The  UK government is set to propose another set of reforms to steer the service towards a 21^st century view of ‘fitness for purpose’.

What, as individuals, we now imagine to be our health priorities have changed dramatically; not least because of advances in science, in medical practice, in a much broader definition of what we mean by ‘care’ and in what we can choose to afford.

The coincident UK news that vast numbers of smokers have abandoned their addiction following the imposition of smoking bans in public places, serves to remind us that policies and politicians matter.

Looking for Lasting Remedies

In the UK the concern for our future health service is, inevitably, an intensively internal debate.  At the same time it should be blindingly obvious that all European countries are, in their own ways, looking for a better diagnosis of their care regimes, looking for long-lasting remedies, looking for lower-cost solutions and looking at a future where global science is challenging the bounds of what is locally possible.

It is, therefore, not so surprising that, not just in Europe but around the world, we can see some commonalities amongst healthcare priorities and the cures that might now be prescribed.

We may be individuals, in individual countries, each with our own way of doing things, but we are all human and to a large extent our bodies function (or malfunction) in much the same way and need much the same care.   So to envision a cure at home it might be helpful to look abroad.

Information Age Healthcare

Stepping back from the detail of everyday doctoring it’s possible to observe some high-level trends that will influence healthcare planning.  At the very top of this strategic mountain is a generic enabling technology that is now transforming healthcare in much the same way as it has already changed (or disrupted) the way we live – leastways for the 70% of European citizens who are now switched on to the so-called ‘Information Society’.

It’s in this context that the emergence of the European Centre for Connected Health illustrates the rapid re-labelling from alternative therapy to mainstream medication.   Who would have guessed that a small country on the fringes of Europe would dare to deliver such a brilliantly big idea?

There’s already a shed-load of theory about ‘Connected Health’ and the transition from industrial-age medicine typified by expensive health factories to the low-maintenance convenience of ‘information-age’ healthcare.  There are umpteen examples from all over the place demonstrating what might be possible if only they were joined-up.

Battle-lines are, no doubt, already being drawn by those invested in established ways – but this over-active genie will not be persuaded back into the medicine bottles of healthcare technologists.

Cultivating Care

Thousands of flowers may bloom and some will prove to be weeds, but who will cultivate healthcare’s new horticultural society?  Who will scan distant lands for exotic solutions?  How can new technological hybrids be developed?  How can the best of breed be tested, and selected, and grown on?

The single most-remarkable thing about the European Centre for Connected Health is that it places Belfast at the centre of Europe.

The second remarkable achievement is that its creators have looked outwards, not inwards, to find solutions that can be shared abroad – and that this open and multi-partner collaborative approach brings to Northern Ireland vastly more in terms of a healthy economy and global status than the narrowly accounted cost of those locally connected health trials.

So this new healthcare 'horticultural society' is itself being cultivated on the geographic fringes of Europe but, at the same time, is at the very centre of a global get-well plan.

The European Centre for Connected Health most probably does not feature today in the UK’s 60^th NHS party but you can be sure it will be written into the history of the European Union’s centenary celebrations.

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See also the January 2008 announcement of ECCH.

© Groupe Intellex NI - 2008