Care is Better If You Have Several Illnesses

Robert W. Griffith, MD

You might think, with all the recent criticism of health care in the USA, that having more than one serious condition would put you at greater risk for poor treatment and nursing; with too much to take care of, one or other of your health problems could be neglected.

Wrong! A report in the New England Journal of Medicine shows that the opposite is the case. Three studies of medical care quality provided a total of 7,680 patients. The studies were the Community Quality Index study (6,712 adults living in 12 metropolitan areas across the United States), the Assessing Care of Vulnerable Elders study (372 vulnerable older patients, defined as community-dwelling persons ages 65 and older who were at increased risk for death or functional decline), and the Veterans Health Administration project (596 male veterans ages 35 and older who were receiving care at 26 clinical sites).

The quality of care was defined as the percentage of quality indicators that were satisfied for each patient. With each additional medical condition, the average quality scores rose - by 2.2%, 1.7%, and 1.7% in the three studies, respectively. There was little, if any, effect of the difficulty of delivering the recommended care on these results.

This is good news, reflecting on the quality of health care in different communities. Maybe our health system isn't quite as bad as everyone makes out.

Source
HealthandAge Blog

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