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Thursday 17 June 2010

Health care economics from the preventive medicine perspective

Back to the preventive medicine approach and how it could change our health care planning and health care economics. Preventive medicine requires a lot of effort and campaigns to implement it effectively in the society.
Combating the pollution instead of building hospital has the state of the art. I would spend fraction of this money on the pollution and the root causes.
In Egypt we built specialized hospital for children cancer mainly from the social philanthropy.
Everybody was talking proudly about this achievement and how it is equipped with the state of the art medical equipments and well trained staff.
I would perceive the whole matter from totally different angle. Firstly no one asked himself why we have this increasing trend of the cancer sick children. No one requested to go through root cause analysis of the problem and trace it to the fundamental causes.
This has to be concluded from medical surveys and statistics which can identify any pattern emerging in the public health and trigger investigation through systematic root cause analysis and pin point to them and the root solutions.
There is no any bit of rationale behind supplying the people with polluted drinking water and sub-standard processed food and heavily polluted air and after that requesting people to donate millions to build medical facilities to cure them.
The planning and the economics of the whole health care system should be re-designed to give priority to make people healthy and to prevent the spread of diseases rather than giving the priority to the treatments.
IF you we investigate many of the medical diseases and sickness, you will find that they are preventable.
We should encourage and provide incentives to the people who are maintaining their health because they are saving the budget of the people from spending it on their treatment.
For instance, we can provide them gym equipments or free tickets to outdoor activities and so on..
In short, instead of waiting for the fire to ignite and to escalate and interfere at this late moment by brining the heavy trucks and the huge fire extinguishers and the fire fighting squads, fight the lit.
Instead of spending millions on bronchitis treatment, plug filters to the cement factories to reduce the fumes. Spend fraction of this money on the public transportation so people will not use their cars wherever they go.
Instead of spending millions on treating the cancer, educate the people about the carcinogenic substances and how they could avoid it.
Instead of spending millions on diabetes, educate the people about the balanced meal and the importance of fibers and reducing the meat…

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