Right care, right time, right person Features Editor Fabian Sutch-Daggett speaks to speak to Jyoti Mehan CEO of Health Care First Partnership Commercial Lead Dr Patrick Wynn about the need for global clinical standards in order to improve primary care delivery
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rimary care is a subject that has been at the forefront of the healthcare discourse over the past few years. The level of investment, training, and dedicated primary care models have also been on the rise, and the all-important connections between primary care and secondary, tertiary, and community level services. However, this is not the case across the globe. In many countries, developing primary care is not a priority - especially
with the enormous and urgent need for acute hospital services due to the Covid-19 pandemic. Hospitals are still the forefront, and sometimes only, provider service which is used - whether that be for a routine check-up, management of chronic conditions, or simply for a bug that won’t go away. All the while, these same hospitals are dealing with critical patients, emergencies, and palliative care. And it is easy to understand why this system has naturally emerged. Implementing a community, consultation-
driven health service, providing the stages of care to meet the needs and requirements of the local population is a task that takes careful planning, assessment, feedback, staffing, training, and of course, time. These concerns are often not a factor when large population centres are in urgent need of health services - something we have seen firsthand in the UK and abroad in recent times with pop-up hospitals required to manage Covid-19 outbreaks effectively. Over time, without the correct primary care pathways for patients, it becomes all too common for highly-skilled clinicians and doctors to be occupied with conditions that they do not need to be treating themselves. This is a triple-edged sword too - if doctors and specialists are overburdened with procedures that do not require their level of expertise, those jobs cannot be performed by nurses or appropriate clinicians either - resulting in less availability for the doctors - and fewer jobs for nurses. Then, it becomes
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