Abstract
Introduction: In the Netherlands, general medical care (GMC) is provided by general practitioners (GPs), elderly care physicians (ECP), physicians in intellectual disability medicine (PIDM), nurse practitioners and physician assistants.
Access to GMC is increasingly under pressure, because of a growing care demand and a relatively small influx of new GMC professionals into the labor force. Furthermore, the available capacity of GMC professionals is unevenly distributed over the Netherlands; with rural areas experiencing severe capacity problems. As a result, the accessibility of GMC for older persons with complex care needs and persons with disabilities is under threat.
To safeguard access to GMC for all citizens (and especially the most vulnerable population) regional collaboration between healthcare providers is increasingly foregrounded by policy makers as a promising solution to capacity problems (Schuurmans et al., 2021).
Context and problem: The program ‘General Medical Care in the region’ is a collaboration between Vilans and Erasmus University Rotterdam (EUR) to aid healthcare providers in this transition to regional care provisions. The program facilitates and stimulates regional initiatives in different healthcare regions, by offering advice and support to regional projects and by researching the mechanisms through which regional collaborations in GMC emerge in practice.
Target audience: Our target audience consists of care professionals, policy makers and healthcare managers interested in regional collaboration in healthcare to deal with capacity problems.
Facilitation: The workshop will be facilitated by Maud Hoogeveen and Marloes Berkelaar, advisors of Vilans and Jitse Schuurmans, assistant professor at Erasmus University Rotterdam.
The workshop will start with a short explanation of the key issue: how is GMC organized in the Netherlands, why do we need a different way of organizing GMC and what are key challenges that hamper this transition?
Then EUR will present their research on constituting mechanisms of regional collaboration in GMC.
We will present examples of alternative models of organizing GMC and in the next half of the session we will have a discussion with the audience of what can be learned from alternative, more collaborative forms of organizing GMC. How can we use this knowledge for integrated care in general?
Take home messages: The key learnings would be inspiration of new ways to organize general medical care in a regional context. Knowledge on how to start and improve collaborations between different sectors, organizations, and professionals, with different views on their occupation, is valuable for integrated care in general.