Health care as currently delivered is too impersonal and policy needs to refocus on the individual - that is the message to be delivered at the University of Dundee on Wednesday (31 October) by one of the UK's most eminent figures in cancer care.
Professor Jessica Corner of the Institute of Cancer Research at the Royal Marsden NHS Trust will deliver the Nuffield Trust Queen Mother lecture - one of the most prestigious lectures in the scientific calendar. She will tell the audience:
"Our encounters with health care as 'patients', or perhaps as the relative of someone receiving treatment or care, seem to be coloured by a feeling that we as people don't matter. We become objects to be processed. Once our health problem is processed, we find ourselves ejected back to our normal lives. Little or no connection exists between the acts of health care and what is normal or what matters to us."
Policy needs to refocus health care on
"The patient of 20 years ago had fewer expectations of personalised treatment than today- In 20 years from now users of health services will be very different from today. They will be able to access a variety of forms of health care information and provision through the internet and other media. They will be better informed, more selective in what they will choose to access from formal health care and much more likely to question medical authority.
"The imperative to consider mechanisms for change therefore is not simply a matter of addressing a system that is currently inadequate. Failure to act may have grave consequences. "
The Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother Lecture is designed to review a subject of particular interest to Her Majesty the Queen Mother, who was incidentally the first Chancellor of the University of Dundee.
Professor Corner first delivered her lecture "Closing the gap between people and health care" this summer at the Royal Society of Arts in London. The University of Dundee was invited to host the same event in Scotland to open it up to a Scottish audience.
Professor Jessica Corner is director of the Centre for Cancer and Palliative Care Studies and Professor of Cancer Nursing at the Institute of Cancer and Royal Marsden Hospital.
The lecture takes place on Wednesday 31 October at 5.30pm in the Tower Extension Lecture Theatre in the Tower Building at the University of Dundee. The lecture is open to NHS, University staff and students.
Sir Alan Langlands, Principal of the University of Dundee is to deliver next year's Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother Lecture on the topic of synchronising Higher Education and the National Health Service.