2023-11-12 09:49:00
Tejerina Shell
València, Nov 12 (EFE).- Internal Medicine specialists advocate promoting a “change in mentality” that promotes a new healthcare model where, given the increase in chronicity and an increasingly aging population, measures such as home hospitalization, telecare or telemedicine.
For the patient, “the further away they are from the hospital, the better,” Dr. Juana Carretero, president of the Spanish Society of Internal Medicine (SEMI), tells EFE, an entity that will hold its forty-fourth National Congress in Valencia from November 15 to 17. , where they will update the different pathologies that these specialists treat and will address aspects such as new technologies and artificial intelligence.
“The challenge of Internal Medicine is to continue maintaining our essence as general practitioners, because we carry out a comprehensive approach to the sick person,” says Carretero, who warns that they face the “fragmentation of the health system in patient care” and The goal of the internist is to “maintain cohesion.”
Currently, he explains, the health system is very focused on acute illness, on treating a specific type of illness that affects the patient at that moment and that “mainly takes him to the hospital,” but “it forgets a little regarding the rest of the conditions.” of the patient that influence the appearance of this disease”.
In his opinion, the person affected by several chronic diseases cannot rotate through five or six different consultations but “should try to see, in the best possible way, by a single doctor and avoid fragmentation in that care.”
That is why he considers that the “greatest challenge” of the health system is “not being able to face all this avalanche of chronic diseases and aging.”
He believes that we cannot continue thinking regarding a health system focused on acute illnesses and on the patient going to the hospital, but rather on assisting them at home on an outpatient basis, and advocates promoting a new care model that promotes home hospitalization, telecare or telemedicine.
“I understand that the further away the patient is from the hospital, the better,” says the specialist, who recognizes that this will mean a “change of mentality for both professionals and managers, since “it will require redistributing resources” but it will result in a ” “better health” for people, because visits to the emergency room and hospital readmissions will decrease.
In his opinion, the current public health system is not prepared for this paradigm shift in patient care, and he assures that there is a “great inequity” in the distribution of home hospitalization units.
Thus, while in Catalonia there are 26 or in Navarra there are more home hospitalization beds than conventional ones, autonomies like Extremadura do not have any “despite the great health dispersion that exists”, and Castilla León only has one.
The president of the SEMI points out that there is a “deficit” of internists and more specialists will be needed, since it is a doctor who works in different places (hospitalization ward, home hospitalization, palliative care, monographic consultations…) and also in shared assistance with other specialties.
Regarding climate change, it highlights the need to take it into account, since for every degree and a half that the planet’s temperature increases, mortality increases, and it also refers to the advantages and risks of the application of artificial intelligence (AI). in this specialty.
Thus, he highlights advantages such as telemedicine or telemonitoring, which allow patients to be treated in their homes, being able to share medical histories or anticipate the appearance of certain diseases, but he clarifies: internists “are humanists, we like to see and touch the patient and those systems take you a little further away from them.
He also points out that although the development of AI is very rapid, legislation in this regard “progresses more slowly.” EFE
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