Jordi Varela, Editor of the blog “Advances in Clinical Management“
It is said that the best savings in health is in avoidable hospitalisation that doesn’t occur, especially since the use of a hospital bed is the most expensive health resource of all the health offers, but also because if one person, let’s imagine an elderly one with several chronic conditions, can avoid being admitted in hospital, his/her health will suffer less compromising situations. For this reason, all health systems are very active in trying to launch all kinds of measures to reduce the admission of chronic and frail patients.
Dr. Sara Purdy, family physician and Senior Consultant at the University of Bristol, published under the auspices of the King’s Fund, in late 2010, an analysis of what actions reduce the unnecessary hospital admissions and which ones do not. The work of Dr. Purdy is focused only on organisational actions such as home hospitalisation or case management, and, in contrast, does not include strictly clinical factors such as the impact of a new drug for asthma conditions.