50-year roadmap to solve health crisis
Conference delegates have proposed a 50-year roadmap to solve the growing crises facing the health sector and to create an affordable healthcare system.
The announcement was made at the end of the four-day ‘EU Science: Global Challenges Global Collaboration’ conference held in Brussels and attended by 1,400 delegates from across the globe.
Speaking to delegates during the conference conclusions, Professor Desmond Fitzgerald, vice president for research at University College Dublin, Ireland, described the growing price of healthcare as an emergency.
“We are facing a crisis,” the professor said. “A combination of increasing healthcare costs, an ageing population and more demand for a very informed citizen. This week we discussed many technologies that could help us, particularly in the discovery of medicine, but the challenge is not technology, the challenge is using technologies to develop an integrated healthcare system that delivers the best healthcare to every one of 500 million Europeans.”
Fitzgerald added that the long-term proposal would “look far into the future” and deliver benefits for patients.
“The solution that we are proposing is a 50-year roadmap for the future of medicine. The challenges, not least harnessing the industry, academic complex and integrating that with the healthcare service, cannot be underestimated. In developing an integrated healthcare system, we will provide unprecedented solutions for the problems that we are facing.”
It is hoped the first stage in the 50-year roadmap will be to create a ‘test bed’ where scientists from industry, academia and health services will be able to collaborate in developing potential solutions.
