PRESS RELEASE
COUNTRY KEY FINDINGS - LESSONS LEARNT
- Sweden has developed a care infrastructure that allows seven out of ten dependent elderly people to receive most health and social care in their homes. Compared to the hospital sector though, there is still a relative lack of standards, guidelines and indicators to measure and assure the quality of community-based care.
- Sweden has a long-established and extensive set of quality registers for many areas of health and social care. Open comparison of municipality-level results has been instrumental in developing an ambitious quality-improvement culture across the country. More needs to be done though to build links between quality registers, in order to build up a picture of the complete pathway of care for patients with complex needs.
- Sweden is pioneering the issue of data linkage by linking individual patient data across its Senior Alert, Dementia, Behavioural Symptoms and Palliative Care registers. This will allow a comprehensive assessment of the quality of care for patients with dementia starting from early detection, through to diagnosis and management, deterioration and end of life.
- Sweden is expanding the role of non-traditional care providers (such as private sector providers or community organisations) in an attempt to expand patient choice and encourage quality-based competition. Close evaluation of these reforms will be needed to ensure that other objectives, such as coordinated care and equity of access, are not compromised.
- Assessment and recommendations
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