Medicine in Society: Science, Responsibility and the Future of Health

Free to attend | CPD certificates available

The Manchester Medical Society is delighted to announce its 2026 Autumn Symposium, Medicine in Society: Science, Responsibility and the Future of Health.

This thought-provoking afternoon will explore some of the most significant challenges and opportunities facing healthcare today. Leading experts will discuss the responsibilities of medicine in a changing world, tackling health inequalities, the impact of artificial intelligence and data science on healthcare, and maintaining public trust in medicine in an era of misinformation.

Confirmed Speakers

Living in an Age of Consequence
Professor Hugh Montgomery
Professor of Intensive Care Medicine, University College London

Talk synopsis:  

Most of us have heard of 'climate change' and 'global warming', but few understand the immediacy and gravity of their impacts.

Greenhouse Gases (GHG) now trap 15 Hiroshima Bombs-worth of energy every second. We have triggered multiple feedback loops: atmospheric GHG concentrations are now rising faster than emissions (as sinks fail and natural release is amplified), and temperature rise is uncoupled from those concentrations. The impacts are all obvious to all, given the Summer of Incineration, the catastrophe in Nepal, and the mounting impacts of the biggest El Nino recorded, unfold. We are triggering irrevocable collapse of the Amazon rainforest and major ocean circulations, and we are already committed to the loss of all our coral reefs.  Even if atmospheric GHG concentrations stopped  rising at once, temperatures don't equilibrate for geological timescales.

Hugh will explain this, and discuss the societal impacts, the implications for human health and survival, and what we must all do.

Provisional topic: Health Inequalities: Who benefits from medical progress, and who is left behind?
Professor Mala Rao
Director, Ethnicity and Health Section, Imperial College London

AI for Better Health Care
Professor Andre Dekker
Medical Physicist and Professor of Clinical Data Science, Maastricht University Medical Center and Maastro Clinic in The Netherlands

Artificial intelligence will have a major impact on day-to-day health care practice with the first AI products widely available. In this lecture meeting the rationale for AI in health care is first presented. Then the importance of data for AI is stressed but access to sufficient data is hampered by many ethical and privacy concerns. Methods to develop and validate AI including a number of trends in this field are shown. Finally applications of two main types of AI are presented – those that lead to more efficiency and those that lead to higher efficacy. 

Learning Objectives:

• Explain why high-quality, representative data are essential for developing and validating reliable AI in healthcare.
• Describe how FAIR and federated data infrastructures enable privacy-preserving data reuse and AI development across institutions.
• Distinguish between AI applications that improve efficiency through automation and those that improve clinical outcomes, including their different implementation challenges.

The symposium will also include the Annual General Meeting of the Manchester Medical Society and the Presidential Address of Professor Nalin Thakkar, Vice-President for Social Responsibility and Professor of Molecular Pathology, The University of Manchester.

Further programme details will be announced shortly...