Visionaries of Health 2023. Minister of Health Adam Niedzielski opened the Wprost conference.

The inaugural panel was titled “Where are we going, or how to prolong the life of the Poles: prevention, coordinated care, innovation”. Before the pandemic, life expectancy for Poles was 74 years and for Polish women 81 years. 19 shortened that life even further. The Minister of Health began the conference by asking what the ministry is doing to reverse this worrying trend.

- The phenomenon, so to speak, of the collapse of this long-term trend of increasing life expectancy is a phenomenon that is widespread throughout Europe. It’s not just that something happened in Poland and we are the only island with this problem. This is a problem that is currently a challenge for all of Europe, if not the whole world. Of course, there are many specific contexts that give us our specificity, because I think that here, especially in terms of age between the sexes, our propensity, or rather lack of propensity, for prevention plays a very large role. And this is indeed a fundamental problem, which, on the one hand, we keep saying that it needs to be solved with the help of education. And we are talking about this education, but this education does not change from year to year so much that we see such an impact on the health of the population,” Adam Nedzielski said.

Prevention is a problem in our society

“Therefore, in addition to training, we need fast tools. The Ministry of Health has just proposed such a tool in the form of Prevention 40+. We can say that “Prevention 40+” was a kind of blitzkrieg in terms of promotion, because we made the brand recognizable for all social groups,” the minister added. – We spent a lot of money on the campaign, because we are talking about millions of zlotys, and we really have some kind of effect… When at the end of the year, when we already saw the summary data for the entire previous year, it turned out that we would be close to these two million respondents, that is, to the success rate that I defined at the beginning. So in that regard, you see that there is a huge amount of resources involved here, and the effect is not that overwhelming. We’re still talking about two million as indicators of success, and I remind you that the population over 40 is twenty million more or less,” he said.

Minister Nedzielski pointed out that we must constantly encourage prevention, also understood as early examination. This is not only the task of the Minister of Health, but also of patient organizations or doctors, who should raise awareness among patients.

– We will expand the offer of the prevention program. Now we want to develop something more male-oriented. But this is such a systematic work, where prevention needs to be built in action,” he stressed.

Medical shortage is a global problem

The minister also drew attention to another very important thing - the health care systems in the coming years will have a permanent problem of a shortage of medical personnel. This applies to the entire healthcare system in Poland and various European countries. As Minister Nedzelsky said:

We cannot optimistically say that we have increased recruitment, recruited doctors from Ukraine, we have a well-thought-out salary scheme and that this will solve our problem. Because ten years from now, we will still have too few such doctors… The demand we are dealing with due to the aging of society and increasing people’s health awareness will grow exponentially.

According to the Minister of Health, it is a pipe dream to think that we will have the comfort of an excess of doctors, despite the actions taken.

Technology as a cure for failing health systems

In order for demand to match supply - to put it very figuratively - technology must appear on a much larger scale than it is currently used, the minister added. “I’m not talking about fragmented point applications here. I also mean the system definition of places for vehicles.

Adam Nedzielski also raised the issue of the ministry’s work to modify the benefit pyramid, which should be driven by home care. It is expected that this will complement the contact with the health system. This is the place to expand the use of technology on a very large scale - for telemonitoring the patient, providing teleconsultations, for introducing innovative solutions that allow the doctor to take care of the patient’s health remotely.

Data as the basis for decision making

Minister Nedzielski noted that such comprehensive monitoring of patients is a source of a large amount of data that will allow the creation of monitoring centers capable of responding accordingly. It’s time to think about how to use this data to develop the health system.

In addition to Minister Adam Niedzielski, the first panel of the conference was also attended by:

• doctor hab. Radoslav Sierpinski - President of the Medical Research Agency,

• prof. Przemysław Mitkowski - President of the Polish Society of Cardiology,

• prof. Andrzej Nowakowski - Head of the Central Coordinating Center for the Prevention and Early Detection of Cervical Cancer in Poland, National Institute of Oncology Maria Skłodowska-Curie in Warsaw,

• Krzysztof Kopec - President of the Polish Association of Pharmaceutical Employers,

• Philip Novak - President of the National Health Foundation,

• Michal Kempovich is Director of Strategic Relations and Market Access, Philips Healthcare.

Visionaries of Health 2023 also includes other important topics related to the healthcare system in Poland.

The next panels will focus on oncology and hemato-oncology, as well as heart disease, kidney disease and obesity, which are an increasing problem in our society. The implementation of the plan for rare diseases and the problem of the shortage of doctors, nurses and health instructors will also be discussed. Panellists will discuss whether disruptive technologies can help clinicians organize coordinated patient care.