Prevention, early diagnosis, appropriate treatments, disease control and monitoring are the keys to reversing the current panorama.
The analysis of the hospital discharge database of our country's public system showed that 27 percent of hospitalizations could be avoided. In adults, among the hospitalizations that could most frequently be avoided through prevention, early diagnosis, appropriate treatments, and control and follow-up are: asthma, diabetes, heart failure, and colon and breast cancer. . In children and adolescents up to 16 years of age, however, gastroenteritis and diarrhea were among the prevalent avoidable hospitalizations.
These data were extracted from an analysis that the IECS prepared last year using information provided by the Hospital Discharge Base prepared by the Directorate of Statistics and Health Information of the Ministry of Health of the Nation. This is a database that represents around 50 percent of all hospitalizations that were carried out in Argentina (it gathers information on about one and a half million people per year) in the years 2000, 2005, 2006, 2007 and 2008. .
To determine which diseases can be resolved at the preventive level with primary care care in our country, we summoned 29 experts. The database was then analyzed based on the diseases indicated as preventable by said primary care specialists in adults and children. The results of that analysis were later published in the magazine “The Journal of Ambulatory Care and Management”.
The figures revealed by this research force us to ask ourselves what is happening with preventive care and with the care of the most frequent pathologies. A possible answer to this question, according to the results of our research, is that work can be done to optimize the organization of the levels of medical care. To reverse this 27%, we consider that, in addition to incorporating more the figure of the family doctor, emphasis could be placed on the development of health services specialized in disease prevention, with special emphasis on chronic diseases.
Although studies have been previously carried out in the United States, Spain, Brazil, Costa Rica and other countries to determine which hospitalizations are avoidable, it is the first time that a study of this nature has been carried out in Argentina. In other words, we now have a kind of “diagnosis”, which we hope constitutes a modest contribution to plan public health interventions that help reverse the current panorama and so that preventable diseases are no longer an Achilles heel in the Argentine health system. .
By Dr. Adolfo Rubinstein, general director of the IECS and director of the Center of Excellence in Cardiovascular Health for the Southern Cone (CESCAS).
The summary of this publication can be consulted at:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/?term=Avoidable+Hospitalizations+rubinstein