The hospital of the future in times of COVID-19
The Observatory Venice Summer Schools are short, intensive courses. The 2020 version was planned to discuss the topic of “The hospital of the future: where patients get appropriate, humane and high quality care, and where health professionals want
to work” in a week of learning, interacting, studying, debating, and sharing experiences with other policy makers, planners and professionals to understand, discuss and improve hospital care strategies and policies. Due to the Covid-19 situation,
we had to abandon the life Summer School this year and instead offer a Virtual Observatory Venice Summer School on the adjusted title of “The hospital of the future in times of COVID-19”.
When: 20-30 July 2020, weekdays 16:00 until 18:00
Who: The course is aimed at policy makers, civil servants and professionals with responsibility for hospital care, whether at policy, self-regulatory, clinical or managerial level.
If you want to make hospitals a place that people look up to, both for high quality patient care and as a place to work, then the Observatory Venice Summer School is for you.
Objectives:
- To question everything we know about what hospitals do, how they work and how they are regulated and paid for until now – and how this might look like in future
- To reflect on how the patients we treat in hospitals are changing, not only in times of COVID-19, i.e. how do we take care of an increasing numbers of frail older patients, patients with multiple complex conditions who don’t easily fit into a single specialty, patients with highly specialist needs whose care is at the forefront of scientific research … all challenges for which COVID-19 is an excellent illustration
- To explore how regulation and management will need to be adjusted at all levels, policy, managerial and clinical to cope with disruptive events, challenges and technologies
- To understand the policies and approaches on this field from cross country European organizations such as the World Health Organization, European Commission, policy makers and professional European organizations and stakeholders.
So what’s wrong with the hospitals we have? What needs to be changed? How do we do it?
Hospitals play an important part in all our lives. Most of us are born in a hospital and many will die in one. Hopefully, we will spend as little as possible of the intervening one, at least as a patient, but some people, with complex chronic conditions, may come to see the hospital as almost a second home. If we are health professionals or managers our involvement with hospitals will be much closer, spending our working lives in them, often at times when most people are at home in bed.
The things that we do in hospitals have changed beyond recognition even in a few decades. Thirty years ago, a patient with a heart attack would have an ECG and some blood tests and put in a bed to rest for a week or more, connected to a heart monitor to detect when things go wrong. Now, they will be whisked to an operating theatre to have the obstruction in their artery removed and go back to work, sometimes within hours. Yet our success in keeping people alive brings challenges. People who once would have died survive into old age, but with multiple conditions and afflicted by growing frailty and loss of function. Patients with cancer who would once have been “treated” with toxic drugs derived from chemical weapons are now given chemo- or immunotherapy targeted precisely to the cells that have malfunctioned.
Elsewhere, we have seen changes that challenge the rationale for having a hospital at all. Advances in chemistry, physics, and biology gave us laboratories, x-ray departments, and clean safe operating theatres. Now we have new ways of seeing, and operating, inside bodies.
Despite all these changes, the way that we organize the hospital, for example around departments of medicine or surgery, has barely changed in 200 years. Nor has the way that we work together, in professional hierarchies, changed much. But change we must, because the current model simply isn’t working. It isn’t meeting the needs of patients and, although health professionals find ways to adopt new technology and models of care (such as networking across hospitals), they often do so despite the design and operation of the hospital.
At the same time, in times of COVID-19, there was the tendency to defend the reliance on old-style hospitals with lots of beds, allocated to certain specialties, with COVID-19 patients being treated just as other patients would be. Only slowly, countries realised that COVID-19 could, and should, serve as a litmus test of how well we are prepared to take care of patients with a highly complex multi-organ disease, where both patient co-morbidity and general health status as well as professional interdisciplinarity are important determinants for patient outcomes.
This Summer School is thus based both on (1) a new study by the European Observatory in which we asked those who should know best, the front line health professionals, to tell us how the work they do is changing and what this means for the way we run our hospitals, as well as (2) the experience of policy-makers, managers and clinicians in countries around Europe in how to tackle the challenges of a pandemic such as COVID-19.
It is taught by people who know about hospitals, from first hand experience, but who have taken time to step back to ask the difficult questions about why we do what we do, and could we do it better – and how would regulation, planning and payment need to enable such improvements?
If you have also asked those questions, please join us virtually this summer!
Organization: the Summer School is organized by the European Observatory on Health Systems and Policies, the Veneto Region of Italy, the European Commission and World Health Organization (WHO).
Faculty:
The Summer School will involve a group of expert lecturers and facilitators from international organizations and centres of expertise.
Preparation:
- The course involves only limited preparation
- All materials will be available in due course at www.theobservatorysummerschool.org.
The European Observatory on Health Systems and Policies supports and promotes evidence-based health policy-making through comprehensive and rigorous analysis of health systems in Europe. It brings together a wide range of policy-makers, academics and practitioners to analyse trends in health reform, drawing on experience from across Europe to illuminate policy issues. The European Observatory on Health Systems and Policies is a partnership hosted by the World Health Organization Regional Office for Europe which includes the Governments of Austria, Belgium, Finland, Ireland, Norway, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, and the Veneto Region of Italy; the European Commission; the World Bank; UNCAM (French National Union of Health Insurance Funds); the Health Foundation; the London School of Economics and Political Science; and the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine. The Observatory has a secretariat in Brussels and it has hubs in London (at LSE and LSHTM) and at the Berlin University of Technology.
The European Commission is the EU’s executive body. It represents the interests of the European Union as a whole (not the interests of individual countries). The Commission is committed to make Europe a healthier, safer place, where citizens can be confident that their interests are protected. It has been a partner of the European Observatory since 2009 and is promoting and facilitating exchange of best practice, and the preparation of elements for periodic monitoring and evaluation.
The Veneto Region seeks to ensure that empirical evidence and analysis reaches national and regional stakeholders and policy-makers. It is involved in comparing health care systems across EU Member States. The Veneto Region is active in the area of cross-border health care and plays a leading role in the EU in research and policy development. The Veneto Region, which has been a partner of the European Observatory since 2004, is hosting the Summer School because it is committed to providing a European platform for political debate on health matters, linking regional authorities to the EU debate.
The World Health Organization, Division of Health Systems and Public Health aims to assist Member States to design, adopt and implement comprehensive health and health systems policies, strategies and tools in line with the values
of solidarity, equity and participation across the broad thematic areas of health systems governance, financing, services delivery and resource generation. The WHO EURO Office hosts the partnership of the European Observatory, collaborating closely
in a range of knowledge brokering activities such as the development of policy briefs and dialogues to support decision making.
