Quick guide to improve accessibility to service: the top 5!

Pere Vivó

It will take a few months, but you’ll finally get there: your agenda will have openings every day of the week and your patients will benefit from a more structured, close and quality care. But how can one overcome organizational chaos, tension and collective waste? Let's look at the five essential rules to make your service accessible:

Top 1. Be original. Be the change!

Accepting that working with waiting lists and continually resolving contingencies is an inevitable and natural situation, is a very serious mistake, as well as that of attributing the situation solely to a lack of resources or investments. We live with variability and, therefore, in the same work centre, with similar population characteristics and conditions, the accessibility data of professionals is very different. Do we question enough why?

Precision medicine, hope or hype?

Cristina Roure

Fifteen years after the human genome has been deciphered, after 3 billion dollars and after 13 years of intense network research, the cost of sequencing the entire genome has been reduced a thousand times and more than 20 million people already get concrete results. In a few weeks, from a simple saliva sample, these people will receive comprehensive information about their genetic material for less than $100 thanks to companies such as 23andMe or Ancestry. In the United States, through an alliance between Genomind and the Albertsons pharmacy office chain, patients treated with psychoactive drugs can receive advice from their pharmacist so that their doctor prescribes a pharmaceutical-genetic test and perform it in the same pharmacy office. It’s spectacular that a series of emerging diagnostic technologies target healthy people to predict or detect diseases early: immune footprint to predict various types of cancer and infectious diseases, biomarkers for Alzheimer's disease, or exhaled breath tests for early detection of lung cancer.

Primary Health Care Centres management notes

It is not the same to sail with no wind as it is to sail with a swell, it is not the same to manage a health unit in calm weather as in a pandemic. But it is useful to learn from storms because, as the sailor knows, they never come alone. 

Europe's public health systems are huge structures that could be likened to a fleet with hospitals as huge ships and Primary health centres as smaller, more agile ships. In these days of disruption with a shower of protocols from the general command but without a clear vision of what we were up against, each unit did what it could. Some maneuvered quickly, others less so; some did so skillfully, others were overtaken by circumstances.

The epidemic of job disaffection compromises the results

Gallup, in State of the Global Workplace Report, considers that a worker is involved in his work when he is enthusiastic about what he does, feels (psychologically) the owner, and produces and innovates to move the organization forward. According to this definition, the job portrait of today's world published by Gallup is very disappointing: only 15% of employees are motivated, while 67% are unmotivated and worse, 18% are actively unmotivated... In Spain, these figures are even worse, as can be seen in the following chart prepared by Corporate Rebels in "The way we work is broken". In fact, the Spanish results, with half the number of motivated workers than the world average, are the worst in the series of the ten selected countries.