Personalised healthcare and population healthcare

摘要

The first reason we cannot separate the individual from the population is that everyone involved in managing health services has an ethical duty to think of the individual. This principle was first enun- ciated in 1789 by Jeremy Bentham in his classic book An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation, in which he wrote ‘Tt is in vain to talk of the interests of the community without understand- ing what is the interest of the individual’.| The second reason is that the value for each individual changes just like the value for the population as the invest- ment in a service increases so people who make deci- sions about populations, for example to increase investment in a particular service change the nature of the clinical decisions made by individual clinicians and patients too.