Dale Atkinson

The cancer system gives patients options but no framework for making sense of them

Personalised cancer care is increasingly framed around more tests, more treatments, and more data – but patients are often left to navigate fragmented information under enormous pressure, with limited guidance and almost no integration between conventional and complementary approaches. Dale is building Beyond the Standard, a charity alongside Jane McLelland (author of _How to Starve Cancer_), to advocate for systemic change: better access to evidence-led complementary treatments, routine genomic testing, and care models that treat the patient as a decision-maker rather than a passive recipient. He speaks about this not as a campaigner but as someone who commissioned his own genomic sequencing, built a daily protocol of 40+ supplements and repurposed pharmaceuticals, and writes about the evidence on The Life Organic. For integrative healthcare providers, healthcare leaders, and patient advocacy audiences, this opens a practical conversation about what patient-centred actually means when the stakes are life and death.

Health-tech is solving the wrong problem – and patients are paying for it

Healthcare organisations talk about patient-centred care while designing services, products, and communications around internal assumptions. The result is innovation that impresses stakeholders but misses the emotional and practical realities patients face when they’re frightened, overwhelmed, or comparing options. Dale is speaking at HIMSS Europe 2026 on exactly this: the layer that captures what the patient actually sees, feels, and decides is almost entirely absent from European healthcare systems. He combines enterprise risk thinking from nearly two decades in financial services with direct experience navigating advanced cancer care across both NHS and private systems. For digital health innovators and patient experience leaders, this is a conversation about whether your innovation is actually reducing friction for patients – or adding another layer of complexity that only makes sense from the boardroom.

Building a business, a charity, and a treatment protocol during Stage IV cancer

In October 2024, Dale was given less than a year to live. Since then, he’s built an integrative treatment protocol alongside conventional chemotherapy and immunotherapy, acquired a premium wellness equipment business during a chemotherapy infusion, started building a charity to improve access to evidence-led cancer care, and is writing a book about the experience. He didn’t do this because he’s “inspirational” – a label he actively rejects – but because structure was the only thing he could control when everything else was uncertain. For entrepreneurship, health, and personal development audiences, this is a conversation about what happens when someone with a systems-thinking background applies that rigour to the most chaotic situation imaginable – and what it reveals about how we make decisions under extreme pressure.