Implementation of Preventive Care in the setting of primary care: opportunities, hurdles and policy needs for integration of Preventive Care in the daily practice of primary care practitioners.

In Flanders, as in the entire industrialized world, the population is eldering and chronic conditions and comorbidities are increasing importantly. Today, non-communicable diseases (NCD’s) have an important negative impact on the quality of life and represent the most important cause of premature and/ or preventable death. Moreover, they also put an enormous burden on the health care system, in terms of need for health professionals, procedures and medicines, short and long term care institutions as well as on the affordability of the health care system. The knowledge that the majority of these NCD’s can be avoided by prevention, through a healthy lifestyle and early detection, calls for more emphasis on and means for preventive health care.

Traditionally and still today, the primary and secondary care practice in Flanders is focused on curation and preventive health care is mainly practiced by others, such as school health services and Maternal and child health services. The fundamental principles of curative and preventive care are very different. Curative care  is based on an individual approach and is driven by individual demands. However preventive health care is mainly based on population health management and driven by, often not expressed, population needs.

When it comes to implementation of preventive care, the WHO advocates a Health in all Policies approach, in which preventive care is implemented in all life settings surrounding the citizen, in order to achieve an integrated preventive care policy that is supported by all policy domains and is part of daily life. One of these settings is health care.

In this workshop we want to exchange experiences on implementation of preventive health care into primary healthcare and to explore the opportunities, hurdles and policy needs to come to a successful adoption of preventive health care in the setting of primary healthcare.  To introduce the debate, the session will start with two short presentations of 10-15 minutes in which experiences  in two different health care systems, i.e. a national health care system and a predominant private health care system, are shared with the participants.