Grey systems in the management of demand for palliative care services in Poland.

BACKGROUND: The concept of care for people in a critical or even terminal health condition, who are in the last stage of their life, has become the mission of palliative care facilities. Therefore, the life of a sick patient poses a number of challenges for health care services to make sure that medical services are tailored to the trajectory of the disease, as well as the various needs, preferences and resources of patients and their families. METHODS: Health systems financed from public funds need to adopt new methods of management to meet the high and arising demand for a long-term care. There are several ways of assessing the demand for long-term care services. The method recommended by the author and presented in more detail in this paper is the one relying on grey systems, which enables the estimation of forecasting models and, finally, actual forecasts of the number of potential future patients. RESULTS: GST can be used to make predictions about the future behaviour of the system, which is why this article aims to present the possibility of using the first-order grey model GM (1,1) in predicting the number of patients of palliative care facilities in Poland. The analysis covers the data from 2014 to 2019, whereas the prediction of the number of patients has been additionally formulated for 2020. CONCLUSIONS: Health systems, particularly publicly funded ones, are characterised by a certain kind of incompleteness and uncertainty of data on the structure and behaviour of its individual components (e.g. potential patients or payers). The present study aims to prove how simple and effective grey systems models are in the decision-making process.

Priorities in the Polish health care system.

Since 1999, Polish health policy has changed, the quality of services has increased, and also the level of financing, mainly from public benefits. Despite constant growth of indexes reflecting the health status of Polish society, such as life expectancy, quality of life, or decreasing index of deaths at birth, just as in the majority of European countries, in Poland the society is growing older, which implies the necessity to reorganize the system. In this paper, the author has described the most important factors that determine the operation of the health system in Poland, as well as presents the ways it was restructured over the last few years, taking into consideration the structural, legislative, financial, organizational, and quantitative aspects. Also, the latest trends in Polish health policy, which take into account new goals of the system, have been presented within.

The proposal of philosophical basis of the health care system.

The studies of health care systems are conducted intensively on various levels. They are important because the systems suffer from numerous pathologies. The health care is analyzed, first of all, in economic aspects but their functionality in the framework of systems theory is studied, as well. There are also attempts to work out some general values on which health care systems should be based. Nevertheless, the aforementioned studies, however, are fragmentary ones. In this paper holistic approach to the philosophical basis of health care is presented. The levels on which the problem can be considered are specified explicitly and relations between them are analyzed, as well. The philosophical basis on which the national health care systems could be based is proposed. Personalism is the basis for the proposal. First of all, the values, that are derived from the personalistic philosophy, are specified as the basic ones for health care systems. Then, general organizational and functional properties of the system are derived from the assumed values. The possibility of adaptation of solutions from other fields of social experiences are also mentioned. The existing health care systems are analyzed within the frame of the introduced proposal.