The Health Care System between Tradition and Need of Change. The Actors of this Change. Issue 1 (January 2015)

• Record Type: Journal Article
• Authors: Barracca, Antonio
• Is Part Of: Giornale di tecniche nefrologiche e dialitiche. Volume 27:Issue 1(2015)
• Page Start: 29
• Page End: 32
• Publication Date: 2015-01
• Subjects: Organizational models -- Medical skills -- Assessments -- Career progression; Nephrology -- Periodicals; Dialysis -- Periodicals; 616.61005
• DOI: 10.5301/GTND.2015.13558
• Languages: English
• ISSNs: 0394-9362

Abstract

During these years we face changes to which we were not prepared, despite these changes have already been addressed elsewhere. Health care costs are becoming progressively higher and somewhat unsustainable because demographic changes are leading to a gradual aging of our population, due to low birth rates and longer life expectancy. Increasingly, longer life is lived in solitude. Therefore, the higher amounts of resources invested do not match the desired health outcomes. The simultaneous aging of the population, the status of well-being that has eliminated many diseases, and a sedentary lifestyle that has brought others, have altogether increased the incidence of degenerative and cardiovascular diseases, as well as tumors, along with the conditions of obesity and diabetes. Consequently, more organs get sick simultaneously, for the same reasons, and for the same risk factors. Therefore, we need to start aggregating the several fragmented medical cultures as to put man at the centre of care. Thus, we should recognize that the organizational models must adapt to these epidemiological changes, and that these changes involve not only the professions, doctors and nurses, but also the roles, powers, responsibilities, and the way we work, not as individual actors, but as protagonists in the care of sick patients with multiple organs involved, and no longer treating a single diseased organ.