Health Care : Current Reviews

Impact on heath economy of a new theoretical framework of health: the Meikirch model

Global Congress on Healthcare and Technologies

August 02, 2021 | Webinar

Johannes Bircher

University of Bern, Switzerland

Scientific Tracks Abstracts: HCCR

Abstract:

In healthcare the physician’s purpose is to improve as much as possible the health of persons who are diseased. So far this was realized intuitively and by medical ethics because no valid definition of health has been available. This became complicated in the last decades because politicians introduced procedures to reduce healthcare costs. In order to create a rational basis for this conflict, I have published a new definition of health in 2020 (ihj-2020-000046). It reads: “A healthy individual must be able to meet all the demands of life. Resources for this purpose consist of a biologically given potential (physical body) and a personally acquired potential (immaterial personality). The demands of life and both potentials are continuously interacting with each other and with the social and natural surroundings. Thus, human health acts as a complex adaptive system.” Healthcare must therefore consider all five determinants of health including their interactions. Due to financial pressures, however, a practice has recently been evolved that limits care mostly to defects of the biologically given potential while largely neglecting the personally acquired potential. Also, nurses’ salaries were kept down. For these problems, the Meikirch model offers the new possibility to rationally weigh medical values against economic values. It can be trusted that by this process decision makers on both sides will in a rational process eventually find solutions that solve the conflicts between the ethics of healthcare and the saving efforts of politicians.

Biography :

Johannes Bircher Born in 1933, he studied medicine at the Universities of Lausanne, Switzerland, Munich, Germany and Zürich, Switzerland. His professional career in internal medicine continued at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, USA, and the University Hospital in Zürich. From 1975 to 1989 he was Associate Professor at the University of Bern, Switzerland and Full Professor at the University of Göttingen, Germany, both in the Department of Clinical Pharmacology. He concluded his formal career as the Dean of the Medical School of the University of Witten/Herdecke, Germany and as the Director of Medical Services at the University Hospital in Bern, Switzerland. He is known as an author and editor in scientific medical literature and is an Honorary Member of the Swiss Academy of Medical Sciences