- Funding Programme
- Year
- 2022
Integrated primary care – the foundation of the Estonian healthcare system
The project focuses on integrated primary care encompassing coordination, collaboration, and governance both within the primary care, but also beyond – with social services. The Beneficiary of the project is the Ministry of Social Affairs of Estonia, and it is funded by the European Union via Technical Support Instrument.
Context
The project addresses the challenges of primary care not being able to meet all (varying) expectations set to it in Estonia, both in terms of access to healthcare and health impacts. The problem is further fuelled by the shortage of physicians and nurses, somewhat misaligned reimbursement models, lack of communication and collaboration between different primary care actors and social services, unused potential of nurses and suboptimal level of digitalization. The project aims to address the fragmentation of health services which has led to inefficient use of scarce medical resources.
Support Delivered
The international project team involved many experts from general practitioners to academics and healthcare professionals. The project was led by the provider and delivered in collaboration with the International Foundation for Integrated Care and various stakeholders. It was funded by the European Union via the Technical Support Instrument.
The project took a holistic approach to Estonian primary care to make the healthcare system more people-centred by establishing a healthcare network connecting primary care and social services.
The project started with mapping best practices and analysing the current state of the Estonian primary care system and moved on to proposing the new primary healthcare cooperation, collaboration and governance model. The last phase of the project focused on assisting the Ministry of Social Affairs of Estonia with implementation of the new primary care coordination model.
Results achieved
The goal of the project was to bring together the general practitioners and primary care centres to form holistic primary care networks and to increase coordination with social services. The networks were to act as accelerators for the empowerment of local communities and urban centres. The networks help to tackle the challenges of lack of collaboration and communication between different healthcare providers, and result in paving the way for the patients to get better patient-centred help where and when they need it, with the optimal resource usage.
More about the project
You can read the documents related to the project here: