Right Care: How to reduce waste

This fourth and last post related to the series "Right Care" from the Lancet magazine ("Definition, gray areas and reversion" was the first, "Between too much and too little", the second, and "Question of attitude", the third), talks about various proposals to reduce the waste with the understanding that the inadequacy in the provision of health services is a wicked problem for which there are no magic solutions and, for this reason, the article "Levers for addressing medical underuse and overuse: achieving high-value health care" makes an effort, which is appreciated, to provide useful ideas to incorporate into the working agendas of both clinical managers and health managers, according to the following proposals to increase the value that health systems should bring to people.

Right Care: focusing on the attitude

Continuing with the "Right Care" series of the Lancet magazine, in this third post (I recall that "Definition, gray areas and reversion" was the first, and "Between too much and too little", the second), I have taken into account the beliefs of patients who, according to Vikas Saini in "Drivers of poor medical care," encourage practices of little value, but I have also described the attitudes of doctors who don’t prioritise the value of clinical practices. Remember that, according to Donald Berwick, between 25% and 33% of health costs are wasted in medical actions that don’t contribute anything or do more harm than good.

Right Care: between too much and too little

In the "Right Care" series of the Lancet magazine, Donald Berwick, in "Avoiding overuse - the next quality frontier", says that inappropriate clinical practices consume between 25% and 33% of health budgets in all countries in the world, but beyond the staggering amount of so much wasted money, there are four characteristics of excess, which Berwick emphasises: a) they affect the full range of health services and all specialties, although unevenly; b) there are specific clinical processes where exaggeration is highly disproportionate; (c) they are not exclusive to rich countries being also found in developing countries and in poor countries, in the latter group still with some dramatic traits, and d) are not related to the greater consumption of resources, since wastage can also be found in areas with less frequencies. 

Some figures of world-wide overuse

In direct observation studies in the first report of the "Right Care" series, it’s estimated that 57% of the antibiotics consumed in China should not have been prescribed, that between 16% and 70% of US hysterectomies are not justified, that 26% of knee arthroplasties in Spain could have been avoided and that 30% of coronary angiographies performed in Italy should not have been indicated. To end this compilation, it’s estimated that there are 6.2 million caesarean sections in excess in the world, half of them in Brazil and China.

Right Care: definition, gray areas and reversals

One of the Right Care Alliance initiatives, led by Vikas Saini and Shannon Brownlee from the Lown Institute in Boston, has been the compiling of 4 reports that are analyzing the misuse, by excess and by default, of health resources from a global perspective.

What does the Lown Institute mean by "right care"?

Before defining the concept of "right care", we must take note of Donald Berwick's definition of quality in the introductory article of the series. The author believes that the quality of care, as we understand it, is too focused on the guarantee of procedures and, despite being correct, the question now is: what do the inappropriate clinical processes mean for people’s health? Berwick states that quality should be understood as the provision of services that respond to people's real needs. So, practically, appropriatness has been filtered in the realm of quality.