This chapter discusses one of the most important ideas shaping health-policy reform and debate: personalisation. It should be said that there is nothing new about individualising or tailoring healthcare. Clinical healthcare, unlike some aspects of population or public health, is always already ‘targeted’ healthcare. However, both technological and cultural changes mean that possibilities and expectations of the degree of ‘tailoring’—to people's bodies, on the one hand, or to people's values and/or life circumstances, on the other—have substantially expanded and intensified. Depending upon how it is interpreted, personalisation can be presented as contributing to both medicalising and de-medicalising currents of healthcare change. It can be used to refer to closer attention and responsiveness to individual biology. It can also be used to refer to closer attention and responsiveness to individual biography. The chapter then presents a very rough distinction between ‘personalised medicine’ and ‘personalised care’.
