WONCA Europe is happy to announce the publication of a new WHO document which highlights the role of compassion in primary health care.
Despite the increasing popularity of the concepts known as person-centered care and the holistic approach, their implementation in real life is far from optimal. Patients’ priorities, preferences, and values are still too often neglected. The tendency to measure the outcomes of primary care just in terms of avoiding hospital admissions, reducing health care costs, and increasing adherence to treatment can cause problems and create distortion.
Quality indicators should be used with caution and wisdom, especially in primary care, as they are mainly related to a few common chronic diseases, and this is not conducive to recognizing the vast range of health problems of our patients. Some core values are difficult to measure because doctors and nurses are pushed to spend too much time on the registration and administration of the required data rather than dedicate this time to the actual care of the patient. Person-centered health care is certainly one the visions of primary care and primary care doctors need to step up and lead the change.
Wisdom, empathy, and compassion are not old-fashioned approaches to deal with our patients, and even less a luxury that we cannot afford to overlook in a period of financial crisis, but essential core values which should always guide our decisions.
We think that primary care doctors who recognize themselves in the WONCA definition, cannot be complacent with the mere achievement of the optimal target of the quality indicators and they cannot be satisfied with the subsequent economic incentives. These indicators measure neither our wit nor our wisdom, neither our compassion nor our devotion to our profession. They measure a variety of factors, except those which perhaps make our profession worthwhile. They can tell us some important aspects about Primary Care management except not whether we can feel proud to be family doctors.