Several factors are putting increasing pressure on doctors across Belgium. General practitioners' association Domus Medica has set out 10 pieces of advice to future governments to circumvent the impending healthcare crisis.
General practitioners in Belgium, and the healthcare sector more generally, have long indicated that they are struggling. Ahead of the local, regional and Federal elections in the country, Domus Medica has pulled on the alarm bells, calling for structural changes to prevent the situation from worsening.
"Healthcare is under increasing pressure due to an ageing population, a growing number of psychosocial problems and a shortage of resources and manpower," the association warned. "If action is not taken quickly, it will place a heavy burden on the health system and compromise the quality of care."
The group said the solution is clear: to prevent this care "infarct", better development of general and primary care is needed. "After all, it has been proven that patients with a permanent family physician in a nearby practice, need less care and live longer and healthier lives."
Committing to prevention and setting uniform health goals
To achieve this, it proposed ten concrete recommendations around four themes – "Let family physicians be family physicians", "A turnaround to more prevention", "Health care is collaboration" and "No integrated care without integrated policies" – in a memorandum sent to politicians and political parties on Saturday.
In the first category, the group says every general practice, regardless of practice form, should be able to receive at least administrative and nursing support and governments must commit to reduce the administrative and other burdens on family physicians. It also called on local authorities to facilitate the retention, attraction and development of GP practices on their territory.
From a prevention point, the association wants governments to commit to knowledge about how a patient can make optimal use of the general practitioner and other actors in the healthcare landscape, through a comprehensive public campaign and the launch of an accessible online platform. This would reduce the demand for less urgent GP interventions.
It also called for governments to strengthen GP circles so that the collaboration between doctors and regional hospitals, as well as other care providers on call (pharmacist, dentist, psychologist, etc.) is strengthened.
Finally, it says all trainee specialists should do six months of internship in general practice during their first years of specialist training, just as trainee general practitioners already do six months of internship in a hospital. In this way, cooperation is taught, the reasoning goes.
"We call for a constructive dialogue, social debate and cooperation to transform the memorandum's proposals into concrete actions," Domus Medica said. "All policy levels must be fully committed and work together to realise the proposed measures to strengthen health care in Belgium."
