Uncovering the Cost of Waste in the National Health System: Inefficiencies, Overuse, and Adverse Reactions

2023-10-27 17:15:00

The researcher at the Health and Biomedical Research Foundation of the Valencian Community (FISABIO), Salvador Peiró, has stated that “one in every 4 euros spent in the National Health System is not providing value in terms of health and well-being”, and that between 5 and 10 percent of total health spending could be wasted. He referred to these terms during his speech during one of the thematic tables of the XXXIX Congress of the Spanish Society for Healthcare Quality, which is being held in Murcia. There the expert has pointed out different sources of waste, from failures in the provision of care, to errors in coordination, administrative complexity, excessive prices due to issues of monopolies and patents, fraud, abuse and bad governance or overuse, among others. Peiró has emphasized that waste is not only an expense per use, “it is also the cost of therapeutic failure and adverse reactions.” For example, he has commented that 1.7 million admissions to the Emergency Department occur “due to adverse events.” In this sense, he recalled that there are many studies that reveal this waste. Firstly, the cost of overuse could exceed 10 percent of the total expenditure of the National Health System (SNS). And it has provided some data, because for example, studies in the SNS offer, according to hospitals, figures of 1 to 24 percent of unnecessary surgery for cataracts, 12 percent for knee arthroplasty and 5 to 14 percent for arthroplasty. Hip. “And up to a third of radiological examinations performed in hospitals would be inappropriate,” he added. In Peiró’s opinion, there is “too little information to quantify the impact of this miscellany of elements (from organizational failures to poor governance, through other elements) in terms of waste, but it would not be too far-fetched to conjecture what it could mean between the 5 percent and 10 percent of total health spending, although it would partly overlap with that from other sources of waste. With all this data on the table, he says a certain amount of waste may be inevitable, “but it’s always resources that are taken away from caring for other patients.” In this regard, Pedro Parra Hidalgo, president of the Scientific Committee of the Congress, who has moderated this thematic panel, has argued that “quality has to be the spearhead of the transformation of the health system; it is essential as a work horizon.” In his opinion, he has concluded, “complete cycles of evaluation and improvement are missing.”

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