Doctors need to read this, but so do possible patients; an excerpt:
“Western health care systems have been built around the concept of patient-centered care,” physicians Mirco Nacoti, Luca Longhi, and their colleagues at Papa Giovanni XXIII Hospital in Bergamo urge in a paper published on Saturday in NEJM Catalyst, a new peer-reviewed journal from the New England Journal of Medicine. But a pandemic requires “community-centered care"....
“We are far beyond the tipping point,” Nacoti and his colleagues write. With 70% of ICU beds reserved for critically ill Covid-19 patients, those beds are being allocated only to those “with a reasonable chance to survive,” as physicians make wrenching triage choices to try to keep alive those who have a chance. “Older patients are not being resuscitated and die alone without appropriate palliative care, while the family is notified over the phone, often by a well-intentioned, exhausted, and emotionally depleted physician with no prior contact,” they report....
To have any hope of avoiding that disaster in the U.S., the health care system needs to decentralize and make the community a focus of interventions on a par with patients, said Cereda, a graduate of the medical school at the University of Milan who has been in touch with colleagues in Italy....
One such step reflects the finding that hospitals might be “the main” source of Covid-19 transmission, the Bergamo doctors warned. The related coronavirus illness MERS also has high transmission rates within hospitals, as did SARS during its 2003 epidemic....
Although doctor house calls seem as prehistoric as rotary phones, home-based care for Covid-19 patients may be necessary in order to protect the community even if, to an individual patient, hospital care might be more effective....
