Healthcare in the UK – Predictive, Preventive and Personalised Medicine Perspective at the Beginning of the Twenty-First Century

Abstract

The National Health System (NHS) in the UK has evolved to become one of the largest healthcare systems in the world. In 2010 the UK government in its 2010 White Paper “Equity and Excellence: Liberating the NHS” has announced a strategy on how it will “create a more responsive, patient-centred NHS which achieves outcomes that are among the best in the world”. Here we present an overview of the UK healthcare system as it stands at the end of the first decade of the twenty-first century, with emphasis on established and emerging Predictive, Preventive and Personalised Medicine (PPPM) elements.