Networking Alpine Health for Continuity of Care
Demographic change is a global trend which particularly affects the Alps. A rising number of elderly brings to a significant growth of patients with chronic co-morbidities and age-related conditions. Changing society calls for political actions able to answer to new needs coming from an ageing society to ensure its wellbeing. NATHCARE aims to design, consolidate and validate an “healthcare local community” model embracing all the players of the system for securing a sustainable and improved organisational adaptation of healthcare services. The proposed model, capitalising on the ALIAS project, will analyse the process for an hospital-territory integration addressing mainly, but not exclusively, chronic diseases in the perspective of continuity of care as dimension of the demographic change. The NATHCARE model will be offered to the attention of policy makers, as an example on which they can get inspired to adopt orchestrated policy strategies to mitigate demographic change impact on healthcare systems.