The Future of Healthcare is Prevention by Dr Dan Brook

When I first became a doctor, much of medicine was necessarily focused on diagnosing and treating illness once it had already developed.

That remains enormously important, and modern healthcare continues to achieve remarkable things. But over recent years, I have become increasingly interested in another question:

Rather than simply treating disease, how can we identify risk earlier and help prevent disease from developing in the first place?

It is a question that has shaped much of my recent work and has become an increasingly important part of how we think about healthcare at The Brook Surgery.

How Prevention Has Evolved At The Brook Surgery

Preventative medicine is sometimes presented as something new. In reality, prevention has always been part of good general practice.

Understanding family history, monitoring blood pressure and cholesterol, discussing lifestyle, vaccination, appropriate screening and helping patients reduce known risk factors have always been central to our work as GPs.

What has changed is the range of information and investigative tools potentially available to us.

At The Brook Surgery, our clinical team has increasingly incorporated newer approaches where we believe they are appropriate. Alongside established risk assessment and lifestyle interventions, this can include more detailed cardiovascular and metabolic biomarkers and, in selected circumstances, targeted imaging such as coronary calcium assessment, ultrasound or MRI.

These investigations are not a substitute for established NHS screening programmes, nor do we believe everyone benefits from an ever-expanding battery of tests.

In fact, I believe the opposite principle is increasingly important:

Good preventative medicine isn’t about doing more tests. It is about making better-informed decisions earlier.

A test is valuable only if it provides meaningful information in the context of the individual and has the potential to influence what we subsequently do.

Prevention Has To Be Personal

A healthy 35-year-old and a healthy 65-year-old should not necessarily undergo the same investigations.

Someone with a strong family history of premature cardiovascular disease may have very different priorities from someone with a significant family history of cancer. Age, lifestyle, medical history, medication, previous results and personal goals all matter.

This is why effective prevention should begin with the person rather than a predetermined package of tests.

We need to understand where an individual’s most significant potential risks lie, what we already know and what additional information would genuinely be useful.

And, crucially, we should ask: would the result change what we recommend?

Preventative medicine is most valuable when information leads to appropriate action — whether that means lifestyle change, treatment, further investigation, surveillance or reassurance that nothing more needs to be done.

Why Personalised Prevention Can Be Difficult To Access

The NHS already delivers preventative healthcare on an enormous scale through vaccination, screening, cardiovascular risk management, diabetes prevention and many other areas.

But NHS general practice is also managing extraordinary demand from patients who are currently unwell or require treatment for established conditions. Understandably, this limits the time and resource available for more intensive, individually tailored preventative investigation outside established programmes.

At the same time, we have seen rapid growth in commercial screening, longevity medicine, direct-to-consumer testing and the wider fitness and biohacking world.

This has brought valuable innovation and increased people’s interest in their long-term health. But it can also create confusion.

Which tests are genuinely useful? Which are unnecessary? What does an abnormal result actually mean? Does it require treatment, further investigation or no action at all?

One of my concerns is that preventative healthcare can become focused on buying more tests rather than making better decisions.

The goal should not be the greatest possible quantity of health data. It should be the right information, for the right person at the right time – interpreted in the context of that individual.

Learning From The Frontiers of Preventative Medicine

My own interest in this field has expanded beyond my day-to-day work as a GP.

I became UK Medical Director for Ezra, one of the pioneers in whole-body MRI screening, and more recently UK Medical Director for Function Health.

These roles have allowed me to work alongside clinicians, scientists and innovators exploring how imaging, biomarkers and increasingly sophisticated data analysis can improve our understanding of health and future disease risk.

A blood test tells one part of the story. Imaging may tell another. Family history, genetics, lifestyle and clinical assessment add further pieces.

Increasingly, medicine is exploring how these different sources of information can be considered together. Emerging AI technologies may eventually help clinicians identify patterns of risk and disease that would previously have been difficult to recognise.

I don’t believe the future of preventative medicine will be built around a single miracle test. It is much more likely to come from combining the right information intelligently to develop a richer and more personalised understanding of health.

What Does This Mean for Brook Surgery Patients?

Many of these conversations can already take place within The Brook Surgery.

Whether during routine consultations or as part of our more comprehensive medical assessments, our doctors can help patients think proactively about their future health.

That might begin with family and medical history, lifestyle, cardiovascular and metabolic risk, cancer risk, previous investigations and existing screening results.

Where appropriate, we can consider whether additional investigations would provide useful information, arrange them and — importantly — interpret the results in the context of the patient’s overall health.

Because collecting data is not the objective.

Understanding what that information means — and deciding what, if anything, should happen next — is what matters.

This reflects a shared belief across our clinical team that good medicine should involve helping patients stay well, not simply treating them when they become unwell.

I would encourage any Brook Surgery patient interested in their longer-term health to start that conversation with us.

Extending This Approach Beyond The Brook Surgery

Patients have frequently asked whether friends, family members or colleagues who are not registered with The Brook Surgery can access a similar approach.

This was one of the reasons Dr Lisa Setchell and I established Brook Preventative Care (BPC).

BPC is a separate, doctor-led preventative health business. It is not part of The Brook Surgery and does not replace an individual’s own GP. It has been created, in part, to make a clinician-led approach to preventative health available to people beyond The Brook Surgery.

The principle behind it is straightforward:

Start with the individual, not the test.

We begin by understanding the person’s age, medical and family history, lifestyle, existing tests and scans, concerns and longer-term health goals.

From there, the approach is to:

Understand risk → Assess existing information → Investigate selectively → Interpret the findings → Agree appropriate action → Review over time

For some people, existing information may already tell us a great deal and little additional testing will be necessary. For others, further blood tests, imaging or other investigations may provide useful information.

The important point is that investigations should follow clinical assessment rather than the other way around.

The purpose of BPC is therefore not simply to provide access to tests. It is to provide the clinical thinking around them: deciding what may be useful, interpreting the findings and helping someone understand what practical steps should follow.

Where findings require ongoing treatment or management, BPC can work alongside the person’s existing healthcare providers rather than seeking to replace them.

For Brook Surgery patients, it also provides a way of sharing this approach with friends, family members and colleagues who may be interested in taking a more proactive approach to their health.

BPC and The Brook Surgery are separate businesses, but they share an important clinical philosophy:

Prevention should be personalised, proportionate and guided by good medical judgement.

Looking Ahead

I believe we are entering one of the most interesting periods in modern medicine.

We are developing increasingly sophisticated ways of understanding risk, detecting some diseases earlier and personalising prevention. None of this removes uncertainty. There will never be a test that predicts everything, and no approach can eliminate the possibility of future illness.

But if we can identify important cardiovascular risk earlier, improve metabolic health before diabetes becomes established, detect some cancers at a more treatable stage and help people remain healthier and independent for longer, the potential benefits are considerable.

Ultimately, preventative medicine is not about trying to predict the future perfectly.

It is about using better information earlier to make better decisions about our health today.

Dr Dan Brook – September 2026