12 May – Redesign health and social care ecosystems towards a more integrated model of care implies having the evidence of successful change, implemented in a cost-effective way. When redesigning health and social care ecosystems in the EU and their financial mechanisms to guarantee quality and safety, it is critical to foster nurses solutions strengthen integrated care and workforce development. To improve health outcomes, the financial models underpinning EU health and social care systems require a shift from the current quantitative financing methods based on Diagnoses Related Groups towards a financing methodology incorporating indicators that capture integrated and continuity of care and patient empowerment alongside quality, safety and cost effective patient outcomes.
Nurses are the largest professional group in the health sector, mainly being frontline, 24 hours/7 days in a roll, 365 days a year. Nurses are frontline to coordinate care and empower patients and citizens. In order to get lead to the notion of an empowered patient within a people-centred health and social care ecosystem, a new financing system will need to emerge to make health and social care systems more accessible and sustainable. This implies moving away from the traditional medical, disease oriented model toward an integrated model based on continuity of care, within a sector and between sectors. The communication between the different sectors on the continuum of care is key to re-centre the focus on the patient’s overall healthcare journey.
Therefore, good examples of integrated care that provide evidence of the current opportunity to redesign health and social care systems (based on existing cost-effective integrated care models, and driven by quality and safety), need strengthening and up-scaling throughout the EU.
It is within this context that EFN, as coordinator, developed with key stakeholders in the health and social sector the EU Guideline on Integrated Care, focussing on the deployment of eHealth services to support the provision of integrated health and social care services to an individual citizen, family or population in their own home(s) or in primary, secondary health, and social care settings; and an EU Guideline on Advanced Roles, intended at managing decisions about how eHealth services can be usefully deployed in the introduction and development of advanced roles for nurses and social workers in health and social care. Advanced roles for nurses are being developed in response to increasing and rapidly changing health and social care needs within restricted budgets and are seen as the way forward in order to improve access to care and patient outcomes, contain provider related costs and improve recruitment and retention rates through enhanced career prospects.
Although it is important collecting comparable data, providing analysis and forecasts, and recommending reforms as part of the European Semester process, it is in EFN view even more important to trust frontline and upscale the good cases frontline has been working on for years, implementing change at local level, their where people live and work! We need to bring Europe closer to its citizens and vice versa. Nurses, due to their daily frontline experience, have clear views on what “good governance of the health and social ecosystem” should be and “workforce composition” needed to achieve better health and wellbeing outcomes for the entire population, leading to safeguarding the “value of European Health and Social care ecosystem”.
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References:
- European Commission Communication on effective, accessible, and resilient health systems
- Making it happen: the European Semester
Articles:
- Enhancing the provision of health and social care in Europe through eHealth
- Upscaling Integrated Care
- EU Accession: A Policy Window for Nursing?
- Women in Integrated Care and eHealth
- When Personalised Medicine, gender and dementia meet!
- Evidence Based Policy-making for Health System Reform in the EU