Our Future Health - will it work?

New research project could transform NHS with preventive medicine approach

From my radio this morning came news that could shape the future of the UK. No, not the latest episode of the “Who’s Prime Minister this week?” soap opera but an initiative called Our Future Health.

This is a programme to recruit 5 million volunteers to help develop new ways to prevent, detect and treat diseases. The volunteers would undergo various tests and give researchers access to their health records and the long-term aim would be to transform our healthcare system so that it can prevent disease rather than just try to treat it when it may be too late.

As someone with two long-term health conditions I’m always extremely enthusiastic about this kind of project. But I had a nagging thought at the back of my mind that it reminded me of something. Then I remembered UK Biobank. This was a data sharing programme which tried to do something similar to Our Future Health, albeit on a smaller scale, recruiting half a million volunteers aged from 40 to 69 between 2006 and 2010.

But as I wrote in July, the Biobank ran into problems with getting access to GP records even though participants had given their permission to hand over their data. Only 1 in 5 GPs had pressed the button to release the records, with many understandably concerned that they might fall foul of data protection regulations. When Covid came along the Health Secretary Matt Hancock used emergency powers to force the release of the data to help track the pandemic but now there’s concern that the information flow will be halted again now the emergency is over.

So will Our Future Health face similar issues with access to data? I spoke to Professor Sir Rory Collins, director of UK Biobank, who made it clear that he welcomed this new initiative. He explained that it had very different and more ambitious aims than the Biobank which was devoted solely to researching diseases: “The plan with Our Future Health is actually to learn what happens when you use the kind of information that has come out from UK Biobank in terms of prediction of disease or prediction of people who are at high risk of disease, when you actually try to implement it within the healthcare system.”

In other words Our Future Health aims to have a two-way relationship with its five million volunteers - they provide data, they get back early warnings which could help them avoid illnesses such as coronary heart disease.

But, says Professor Collins, that presents a different and harder challenge for the project in its relationship with hard pressed GPs:

“The difficulty there is how does feedback of information from genetic tests and other investigations get built into the system in a way that helps the GPs, rather than just causing them more work.”

Bur Professor Raghib Ali, chief medical officer of Our Future Health, is confident that GPs and screening services will value the output of the project. He says the data collected should provide early warning of those at higher risk across a wide cross section of the population from conditions such as heart disease, diabetes and some cancers:“The GPs that we’ve spoken to say it’s better to know earlier who's at higher risk, because of course, it means that they will likely present anyway within the next few years with those diseases. And so knowing early is good for the patient of course, but it can also save work in the longer term because it reduces complications, particularly with things like diabetes and heart disease.”

There is a great prize in prospect over the long-term if this project succeeds in shifting the focus of the NHS to the prevention of illness. But in the short-term that means persuading hard-pressed healthcare professionals at the sharp end of the system to stop and think about changing the way they handle information about every patient. And at a time when it looks likely that we will see the fourth new Secretary of State for Health in sixteen months, a demand for longer-term thinking may be met with a wry smile.