June 27^th - 30^th will see the European Alliance for Personalised Medicine (EAPM) host its second, summer school for young healthcare professionals, or HCPs.

Registration is open now, available here.

Prior to this annual event, EAPM will host a SMART Outreach meeting to focus on the issues surrounding the integration of innovation into healthcare systems in Eastern Europe.

This year’s event will be co-chaired by Richard Ablin, Professor of Pathology at the University of Arizona College, who first observed the antigen PSA as long ago as 1970.

PSA levels are now used as a test for prostate cancer, from which his father had died.

Despite this, Dr Ablin has since famously (and controversially) said that the US effectively wastes billions each year giving preventive prostate cancer screening tests that produce, in the majority of cases, false positives.

Ablin maintains that doctors and patients should be cautious when using PSA as a marker for preventive screening.

With such a high-profile figure as co-chair, alongside former European Commissioner for Health David Byrne (who is also co-chair of EAPM), the second summer school is well set to build on the success of the first event, held in July 2016 in Cascais, Portugal.

This year, the concept will be taken east to Bucharest, Romania, with the school taking place from 27-30 June.

As mentioned, the choice of Bucharest dovetails with EAPM’s SMART Outreach project.

The Alliance’s June 2015 conference introduced the ‘SMART’ concept, which stands for Smaller Member states And Regions Together, and EAPM has been expanding this by taking its message directly to EU countries.

Once again, the school will be entitled ‘TEACH’, which stands for Training and Education for Advanced Clinicians and HCPs, and the goal is to bring young, front-line professionals up-to-speed with fast-moving developments in the field.

Aimed at age-range 28-40, TEACH holds to the thesis that, if personalised medicine is to be in line with the EU and Member State principle of universal and equal access to high-quality healthcare, then clearly it must be made available to many more citizens than is currently the case.

The faculty has been chosen from medical academic, clinical and research specialities, patient organisations and communication experts.

Included will be an interactive session on communication in consultations.

This will allow attendees to watch and comment on a difficult clinical consultation presented as a role-play with a real clinician, but with actors playing the parts of patient and partner.

This baseline session will be complemented by communication workshops that are intended to raise awareness of the importance of good communication between clinicians and patients.

Decision-making in this new era of healthcare is a key aspect when implementing personalised medicine, and one area to be covered under this broad topic at the Summer School is the role of the pharmacist, an expert stakeholder often overlooked.

Furthermore, finding the balance, or middle ground, between new science/technology and medical tradition is not easy so another tutorial session will take a look at various aspects ranging from input from the rare diseases community, a view from the arena of diagnostics (including molecular), profiling and biomarkers, plus the exciting and fast-developing world of gene sequencing.

As mentioned above, one of the key goals in the personalised medicine era is to improve communication between front-line HCPs and their patients.

The latter should have an equal role in any decisions made about their treatment, and this requires them to be able to input vital information, such as lifestyle and work circumstances, as well as to be properly informed from the other side.

Therefore, time at the summer school will be spent on health literacy, clinical decisions with patient involvement and, crucially, improving the communication between the core actors of health decision making.

Source: EAPM