DutchNews, November 25, 2016
Hospital doctors
have drawn up a list of 1,366 treatments which do not benefit patients and are
not scientifically proven, the Volkskrant said on Friday.
Around one-third of
the treatments which have little positive effect concern diagnostic techniques
and four in 10 are to do with medication, the paper said.
Doctors are trained
to treat people, not wait and see, research leader Tijn Kool told the paper.
‘They carry out treatment because that is what they were trained to do or
because other colleagues do this. And don’t forget, patients can sometimes
demand research.’
For example, patients with stomach complaints are routinely
given endoscopies, even though the practice is usually only beneficial to the
over-60s, Erasmus teaching hospital chairman Ernst Kuipers said.
An endoscopy
costs around €300, bringing the bill to €600m a year. Kuipers estimates around
one third of the procedures are a waste of time and says stopping them would
save €20m. ‘We would also stop putting patients through an uncomfortable
process and free up doctors for other tasks,’ he said.’
Rising costs
The total
healthcare bill reached €95bn last year, a rise of 40% on 10 years ago.
The
eight Dutch teaching hospitals were commissioned to look into ways of keep care
affordable by health minister Edith Schippers three years ago.
Over the next
few months, doctors are going to look into the effect reducing the use of eight
different procedures and treatments. For example, they will attempt to find out
if catheters, often a source of infection, can be removed more quickly.
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