Call for health-care projects that focus on prevention

“We are nearing the end of a period of mass medication in health care,” she said this week. “At the moment, we take huge amounts of medication, but actually less than half of it does us any good.”

Lieten stressed that innovative health-care research was a key priority for her ministry. “Over the last 20 years, health-care research has made spectacular progress in understanding the causes of illnesses such as cancer, dementia, asthma, rheumatism, diabetes and heart disease,” she said. “But we are less successful in applying the latest research findings in the treatment of patients.”

She argued that medical science is providing us with a far greater awareness of how the body functions and what makes us sick. Some treatments work for some people but not for others, for example in cases involving breast cancer. She noted also that recent research into biomarkers was helping doctors to anticipate whether a particular individual was at risk from illnesses such as dementia and cancer.