Programme: HEALTH PROGRAMME (2014-2020) (GA 664689)
Date: 2015-2017
The APPCARE project – which involves three countries: Italy, Spain and The Netherlands – seeks to analyse the ways to reduce hospital admissions, in particular the recurring ones. This can be done through a process of selection of the patients the very moment they enter the emergency room and through adequate local interventions, which could allow to face many health problems without hospitalizing, that always represents a stressful and risky situation for the elderly. One of the innovative aspects of the project is the analysis of the efficacy of the insertion of a Brief Intensive Observation in the services network, working as a filter for the hospital admission and as a link with the territory.
The APPCARE project is inspired by some fundamental principles:
- the importance of the “defragmentating care” of the treatments offered, so that the experts that operate in the different segments of the network could provide coordinated interventions;
- the need to adopt the multidimensional geriatric evaluation as a precondition of intervention: an important instrument to reveal the need, avoiding inadequacies due to the lacking knowledge in the realms of the intervention (from the biologic-clinic to the psychosocial ones);
- the need to create paths based on homogeneous data; therefore, the instruments of analysis should be similar in the different places where the elder patient resides and where treatments are offered;
- the attention both to the single frail person and the caregiver, whose role for the achievement of the health equilibrium is getting more and more essential, since the changing in the epidemiology and in the family structure;
- the need for an adequate training of who operates at different levels, in order to define and share methods of work and to decide the outcome to reach both at the level of the single segment and in general;
- the parameters of economic compatibility have always to be at the center of any intervention; in fact, an integrated therapy leads to saving money. However, the interventions should be analysed extensively in order to avoid the lowering of the qualitative level.
