Five Clinical Practice Lessons from the Nobel Prize in Economics

Pedro Rey

The 2017 Nobel Prize in Economics was awarded to Richard H. Thaler ,from the University of Chicago, for his contributions to behavioural economics. As I have explained before, this discipline combines the teachings of economics and psychology to better understand and predict human behaviour and to help us make better decisions, especially in areas such as health, where the combination of having to take many decisions involving risk and having to share private information with people with whom our incentives are not always perfectly aligned, makes us sensitive to multitude of emotions, failures of rationality and psychological biases.

Child care: a nursing perspective

Alba Brugués

Do all professionals working in primary care develop their professional skills adequately? My answer is no, and I believe that the paediatric service of primary care is one of the services in which there is more room to rethink the model of care. To make it easier, I will explain the model of childhood health (this is how I like to express it) that we have been developing for some years at the Can Bou Health Center (CASAP). A model that is gradually becoming known and extended to other primary care centres and which has been presented to national and European congresses and has received great interest on the part of managers and experts in paediatrics and who, at the moment, is offering specific training for those who want to a change orientation of the care of children and their families in primary care.

24/7 virtual visits: also in medicine?

Elena Torrente

A few days before Christmas, I went to London. It was freezing cold and the heavy snow made it difficult to access the big city. In Piccadilly Circus, the street musicians resisted the low temperatures and the Christmas lights adorned the city. When I took the subway, I was surprised by an advertisement: "An NHS family doctor visits you for free 24 hours a day, 7 days a week."

The Babylon Company has reached an agreement with the NHS to offer video consultation services. Citizens can download the application and request a visit with an NHS doctor 24 hours a day, with a response time of about two hours. According to the program website, face-to-face visits can also be scheduled if necessary and prescriptions are sent to the pharmacy of the user's choice. The family doctors attending the video consultations are from the NHS and have about ten years of experience.

Share the decisions table: one more step in the patient's experience

Mònica Almiñana

During the past Christmas holidays, many of us have shared a table with family and friends. Can you imagine if we did it with our patients to decide how we should evaluate their diseases?

That is what the Karolinska Hospital in Stockholm (Sweden) effectively proposes: a whole revolution in the way of understanding the care process. For those who don’t know, the Karolinska is one of the largest and most innovative university hospitals in Europe. It serves a total of 1.5 million patients per year, with a newly built infrastructure that houses 1,600 beds and employs 15,800 people.