Health Minister Frank Vandenbroucke is putting the finishing touches to a reform that should lead to better quality care for patients with back problems. A reform that came into force in September and which should reduce the number of operations performed.
Stephanie has suffered from severe back pain for 10 years. A health problem that ruins his life. “I was able to reach pain levels up to 9 or 10 out of 10”she points out. “Having a bad back is a handicap in everyday life, for the maintenance of your apartment, social life, you withdraw into yourself…”
In Belgium, back pain is one of the most common health problems. One in five Belgians suffers from it. “A lot of patients come to the physio because they have back pain. If I have to tell you a percentage, I want to say at least 60% of the patient population”underlines Delphine Richir, physiotherapist at the CHU UCL Namur.
“I think that on the traumatology consultations that we do here, backs, we must still easily have 10-15% of our patients who come for problems of back, confirms for his part Nicolas Guyot, doctor of orthopedic surgery. It’s really very common, even when we do traumatology consultations. There are many patients who come for back trauma, who still have lower back pain. Often, these are pains that tend to become chronic, so stay for a while. Patients are a little left behind, they are told that it will pass, etc. And so they often come back to other consultations afterwards with pain that lasts for months and months. There is no diagnosis on it. It’s still relatively common, actually.”
So to cure this pathology, the stage of surgery is often considered… wrongly, according to the Minister of Health, Franck Vandenbroucke. “Today, in our country, we tend to operate a little fast and a little too often, while the added value of these operations is not always clear. This reform must allow patients suffering from back pain or back problems to benefit from better care and avoid unnecessary operations”did he declare.
But solutions other than an operation are possible to improve the patient’s health. It is for this reason that the so-called “vertebral pathologies” reform is being implemented. Reform on which Minister Vandenbrouck has been working since 2015. Since September 1, a multidisciplinary team has been studying the need for an operation on a case-by-case basis. But for Nicolas Guyot, doctor of orthopedic surgery at the CHU UCL Namur, it is difficult to apply the procedure in an emergency. “If we have, for example, herniated discs which become a little dangerous, which have to be operated on quickly. I don’t know if we can have the luxury of going through all the intermediaries”he believes.
The objective of this reform is threefold: to ensure a better diagnosis thanks to an in-depth follow-up of the patient, to adapt the medical treatment accordingly and thus to reduce the number of operations.