Mariotto A, Favaretti C; International Society of Technology Assessment in Health Care. Meeting.
Annu Meet Int Soc Technol Assess Health Care Int Soc Technol Assess Health Care Meet. 1995; 11: Abstract No. 231.
Hospital Medical Directorate, Bassano del Grappa, Italy.
Queue-based rationing of medical services is a widespread method adopted by health care organizations to allocate the limited resources. Providers and patients have long been concerned about the size of waiting-lists and the length of waiting time for admission to hospital. Italy is no exception and 1995 Financial Bill provides for keeping and making public out- and in-patient waiting-lists registers. Most Italian hospitals manage queue with quantitative and informal criteria. Patients are booked into lists in the order in which they arrived there and each consultant must make implicit judgment for determining priority. So, the safety of waiting patients is left to practitioners' discretion of considering those at high risk as "urgent cases" and bringing them to the head of the queue. Additional pathology and deaths of people on waiting-lists, the evidence of different queue-forming criteria between practitioners, ethical reasons, the influence of patient age and work status, are all factors suggesting a new managerial approach to the waiting-lists problem. While efforts have been made to reduce queues, it should be necessary to create explicit criteria for assessing patient priority based on literature evidence and consensus panels of experts following the RAND Co. method for the development of clinical practice appropriateness guidelines.
Publication Types:
Keywords:
- Consensus
- Health Resources
- Health Services Needs and Demand
- Hospitals
- Hospitals, Public
- Humans
- Italy
- Waiting Lists
- methods
- standards
- hsrmtgs
Other ID:
UI: 102215976
From Meeting Abstracts