A mini-neighborhood hospital especially for the elderly, where all patients get out of bed as quickly as possible so that they can go home as quickly as possible. That is the idea behind the country's first district clinic, which opens its doors in Amsterdam today.
The number of over-75s doubles over the next ten years. At the same time, the emergency departments of hospitals can hardly cope with the influx of older people. Research also shows that not all elderly people benefit from a hospital bed.
For initiator and professor of acute elderly care Bianca Buurman all reasons for setting up a different kind of hospital care for the elderly.
Pooling knowledge and experience
The Amsterdam district clinic is located in a converted nursing home and initially receives 24 beds for acute admissions. Health insurer Zilveren Kruis pays the first three years as a trial period.
In this mini-hospital for the neighborhood, everything is aimed at keeping older people as mobile as possible. There is also a lot of attention for the care that is needed at home. The goal is to bundle the knowledge and experience at nursery level of nurses and specialists in geriatric medicine, general practitioners and specialists at the AMC, so that elderly people can stay as mobile as possible and be helped close to home.
And the ambitions are great. "We are going to try to halve the number of elderly people who suffer from functional decline after a hospital admission," says Buurman. "We also want to reduce the readmissions by half." That saves on healthcare costs. And in any case, the neighborhood clinic saves: a bed costs 370 euros per day and in the AMC 750 euros per day.
Medical agreement
The model is in line with the new agreements recently made by the government with, among others, the hospitals. In that Medical Agreement the ambition is to organize less hospital care in the hospital. Instead, that care must be shifted to home, or at least close to home.
But Buurman's experience is that in practice it is not easy to realize that ambition. "We combine primary care, such as community care, with hospital care, actually as the government wants, but there are simply no fixed forms of financing for that."
The transitional means that are mentioned in the Medical Accord, to pay for the transition from hospital care to home, are going to help, she thinks.
Post shared from NOS Dutch News