Medicus, Vol. 14 No. 2_Gerijatrija, 2005.
Review article
Elderly Patients at Family Medicine Office
Aleksandar Jovanović
Nevenka Krčmar
Sandra Mihel
Sanja Musić-Milanović
Vanesa Benković
Teodora Not
Višnja Bešić-Barun
Ranko Stevanović
Ivan Pristaš
Arsen Stanić
Abstract
The increasing percentage of patients aged
65 years and over rearranges and redirects health care
activities, changing the structure of health consumption and
requiring new public health, educational, clinical and other
approaches. The proportion of patients aged 65 years and over
compared with the total number of patients shows that their
percentage is higher than 50% in receiving care for hypertensive
diseases, other heart diseases, diabetes mellitus, arthrosis and
other ischaemic heart diseases. A small number of preventive
medical examinations and home visits reveals that the family
medicine service has become a completely passive health
service in relation to this age group due to the shortcomings in
fi nancing of preventive medicine and active care and control,
as well as in stimulating improvements in the quality of work.
It is necessary to develop algorithms and diagnostic and
therapeutic guidelines for these diseases and conditions within
the information system of primary health care. The use of
diagnostic and therapeutic guidelines and work quality control
should be measured by means of reliable data from the Primary
Health Care information system. In addition, a separate system
of incentives, payment methods, education and encouragement
of family medicine teams should be elaborated in order to bring
about improvements in the health care of patients above 65
years of age.
Keywords
family medicine; aged 65 years +; work description; diseases and conditions
Hrčak ID:
18868
URI
Publication date:
17.10.2005.
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