Abstract
General practitioners (GP) are often seen by citizens as the first and most accessible gateway to primary healthcare. However, this image is slowly crumbling, since the accessibility of GP care is under pressure. More and more GP’s refuse to take in new patients. Calls for change from both patients and GP’s are regularly published in the press.
The population is ageing, care is becoming more chronic and complex and the length of stay and number of beds in hospitals decrease which demands more deployment of primary health care. New ideas are necessary to ensure care accessibility. Using an objective, data-driven approach we try to implement care capacity planning.
Flanders is currently working together with (local) associations of GP’s on creating an accurate and up-to-date database of the available general practitioners health care services compared with the local care need. The pilots, in collaboration with university researchers, an expertise centre in primary healthcare, associations of GP’s and GP’s are finished and delivered a scientifically underpinned and workable questionnaire and a working technical environment to accumulate data.
Our goal is twofold: on a Flemish (macro) level data will be used to write policy regarding the organization of primary healthcare and it will incentivise the meso (local associations of GP’s, local care councils and local governments) and micro level to change local organization of care. Governments will never be able to solve care capacity/accessibility problems alone. Each actor needs to participate to ensure continued accessibility of care through data.
Presenting the data in an accessible, intuitive way is an absolute prerequisite for the data to be used locally. We are closely working together with (associations of) GP’s to engineer maps, more specifically about how to design them to ensure their usefulness for local use. Since change is never easy, another project is in the starting blocks to install coaches that can help with funnelling ideas into meaningful actions and tailoring plans to specific regions. This should result in better accessibility of care for patients, which is our end goal.
Unsurprisingly, the mismatch between care capacity/accessibility and care needs in primary healthcare exists also for other professions. Rather than reinventing the wheel for every different healthcare profession, lessons can be learnt from the set-up for general practitioners. With advancing insights from the current project we hope to take the first steps regarding capacity planning for another healthcare profession in the upcoming months. Also, links will be made with the care capacity planning of hospitals and other actors.
Flanders is not alone in tackling the challenges of care capacity planning. The objective is to identify international similar projects, share our experience and build a learning network.
This presentation shows not only the technical and legal difficulties of care capacity planning, but also the importance of building trust so that healthcare professionals actually want to share their data with the government. Lastly, we will talk of the complexity of translating data into usable information for both policy makers and healthcare professionals and the implementation of change.