Real Personalisation Will Never Happen

I really get sick of a small minority of people with vested commercial interests saying that personal healthcare budgets (PHBs) delivers "personalisation". I am sick of it because they don't seem to understand what personalisation is. Such people insist that by turning patients into consumers will personalise their care. It won't, it just turns them into consumers with the responsibilities and worries that come with spending budgets carefully.

Let me give you an example of where we need personalisation, where PHBs will not deliver this personalisation, and a subject which commissioners obsessed with their version of "personalisation" have shown no interest. Prescription medications.

I have three long term conditions and so I take seven different drugs. Since one of those drugs is not available in the dose I take, I take three pills of it. That means I take five pills in the morning, two before I go to bed (the other medication I take is two types of insulin). That is a small number of pills compared to many elderly people. I am middle aged, with relatively good eyesight (OK I have diabetic retinopathy, so that increases my count of long term conditions to four). I have good co-ordination and memory. Yet I still forget to take medication. Sometimes I get to the end of the fortnight and realise that there is one pill left over in the blister pack, so clearly I had missed that pill sometime during the last 14 days, with no idea when.

My pharmacist knows what drugs I take, it's on my prescription script and she attaches a label telling me when to take them. Instead of me having blister packs for seven drugs, why not blister packs for the seven days in the week? Half of the strip for morning, half for evening. It's Tuesday, so I take the strip that is marked (IN BIG BOLD LETTERS) Tuesday. I do not have to go hunting for the right blister pack for the right drug, because that has been done by the pharmacist already.

That strip of pills can only be used by me, because no one else has my combination of long term conditions requiring exactly those doses. This is real personalisation and it will never happen.