Liz Kendall spoke about her project, "The Twentyfirst Century Patient'.

Across Europe, the past decade has seen a raft of policies which have sought to ensure that health services become more 'patient centred'. In the UK in particular, despite these efforts, the rhetoric of a patient centred NHS often fails to materialise in reality.

Profound challenges to the ways in which health services are organised, delivered and experienced are already on the horizon. The human genome project is increasing our understanding of the role genetics plays in disease, creating new opportunities for diagnosis and treatment. Developments in information technology are opening up new ways of delivering and accessing health services.

These and other technological advances are influencing, and influenced by, wider socio-cultural changes in society, where patients are increasingly informed and less deferential and where knowledge is no longer the sole preserve of health professionals. In recent years, a number of analyses of likely future trends in health and health care have been produced.

Most assessments of future developments, whether these focus on policy issues such as evolving professional boundaries or the onset of new technologies like telemedicine, tend to focus on the attitudes of and implications for professionals and policy makers, not on what current or future patients' views or reactions might be. Yet developing an understanding of patients' attitudes towards likely future trends is crucial, not only because they could affect if and how future developments are implemented but also because of broader democratic and accountability issues.

Moderator: Stephen Pollard, CNE senior fellow

Liz Kendall is the Senior Research Fellow in Health and Social Care at the Institute for Public Policy Research, the British think tank most closely allied to the Blair government.

Ms. Kendall speaks and writes widely about policy issues in the print and broadcast media. She is the author of The Future Patient (IPPR, 2001), which analyses patients’ changing wants, needs and expectations and the implications for policy makers and practitioners.

She is currently responsible for three programmes of research: The Future Health Worker, New Visions for Social Care and The First 12 Months.

In 1996, Ms. Kendall went to work as a Political Adviser to Harriet Harman MP when Ms. Harman was Shadow Health Secretary and then Shadow Social Security Secretary. When the Labour Party won the 1997 election, Ms. Kendall became Special Adviser to the Department of Social Security, and then Senior Research Fellow in Public Health at the King's Fund, a health care think tank in London.