Medical Decision Making By Frail Old People In Hospital

With the ageing population more and more old people survive acute and chronic illnesses and live longer - but at the same time they are sometimes in need of hospital care - but are hospitals adapted to old people with many conditions and comorbidities? This book describes how the frail old patients sometimes feel like a burden to the health care and how the health care professionals give explains how they often try to avoid taking care of old people because of lack of time and proper competence. In the same time health care professionals give expressions of frustration and guilt not being able to provide a good care. Especially the physicians feel they are trapped between the needs of the patients' and the remunerations systems rewarding time-constricted health care production (number of investigations, operations, easy accessibility etc.) - not a time-consuming holistic view on all illnesses and medications including communication with the patients and caregivers. Health care is revealed as not well adapted to meet these patients' complex needs. Finally a suggestion for a model to improve care of frail elderly patients is presented.

Auteur

Anne was born -56 in Denmark. She has been former head of Geriatric Departments and always had much focus on patient participation and how to strengthen the patients role in health care. She is President of Swedish Association of Geriatric Medicine.