Who’ll talk about us when we’re dead?

Antoni Peris

First of all, allow me to recommend that you rush out to see A ghost story (D. Lowery, 2017). It's not a ghost movie. It's a movie with ghosts. It's not a movie about grief. It’s a film about permanence, about memory, about the permanence of memory and our will to endure as human beings. We are asked, what will remain of the Ninth Symphony of Beethoven when a thousand years have passed. And what will remain of us? Who will remember our passing through this world? The presence of A ghost story (ironically presented as one of those phantasms of children's stories, with a bed sheet and holes to see through) is something that refuses to disappear, perhaps the boy that appears at the beginning of the movie, perhaps the ghost of the house, or of the place, or perhaps the accumulation of experiences that take form whilst trying to continue their existence; It’s a beautiful and serene film exploring whether our existence and memory make any sense.

On the subject of continuity of care in hospitals

Last week we debated how the longitudinal continuity of primary care affects the comings and goings of chronic patients to emergency services. Along this line, I would like to explore the difficulties that hospitals have in guaranteeing ongoing health care services especially at night and at weekends, and how this problem weighs on services when taking care of the most vulnerable groups.

Imagine that a frail person enters a hospital due to acute decom-pensation, according to the known evidence, a global geriatric eva-luation and an individualized therapeutic plan should be deve-loped in agreement with the primary care team, if the desired outcome is to have a reasonable chance of returning home as soon as possible and in the best possible condition. The problem originates in that the hospitals, not even the best of them, are able to give a continuous response to patients as described, since the usual medical equipment usually offers a continuous coverage of only 27% (From a 5 day week of 8 to 5). What happens in the remaining 73% of time (evenings, nights and weekends)? As our imaginary patient, although you would enjoy medical coverage on duty, the service you will receive is very likely far from guaranteeing the continuity necessary for the fulfilment of your personalized plan.

Dysphagia and "minimal mass interventions": ethics, management and value

Marco Inzitari

In recent times there is an increased risk that the relevant becomes unseen. I understand that readers are mainly from the world of health but did you know that in Barcelona, ​​at the end of September 2017, the European and world congress on swallowing disorders was organized? And that the current president of the European Society of Swallowing Disorders is very close to us because he’s Dr. Pere Clavé, gastroenterologist and academic director, teaching and innovation at the Hospital de Mataró?

I was fortunate to be invited to talk about Dysphagia in older people in this meeting, with the opportunity to review the advances in this area. I don’t aim to venture into any clinical treatise on Dysphagia, but I think it’s useful to disseminate some aspects that are in line with the "value practices" advocated by this blog.

Innovation or decadence. There’s no middle ground

Josep Maria Monguet

Innovation is not a fad; it’s a structural phenomenon of the future, largely a product of the acceleration in the production of new knowledge. Innovation was always part of our world, but there are two new factors nowadays:

1. Accelerated innovation: more novelty in products and services are observed more frequently.
2. It's everyone's business: each one of us are protagonists of innovation.

The status of the patient's experience throughout the world

Anna Sant

"The State of Patient Experience 2017" is a study carried out by The Beryl Institute, were officially published to expose a global patient's experience. The conclusions have changed with respect to the study presented in 2015.

The Beryl Institute and "The State of Patient Experience 2017" 

The Beryl Institute that I referred to earlier in this blog, is a community dedicated to improving the patient experience around the world through collaboration and shared knowledge. The organization, based in the United States, prepares this study biennially since 2011 to share the challenges and opportunities that health organizations around the world are finding in their approach to improving the patient experience.