Prague, April 13 (CTK) – All hospitals in the Czech Republic could provide palliative care for terminally ill patients after 2020 thanks to an EU-funded project to be launched this year, Deputy Health Minister Roman Prymula told reporters on Thursday.
The project will set the form of palliative care and its coverage from health insurance. Dozens of millions of crowns will be spent on its pilot phase to be tested at several healthcare facilities, Prymula added.
Palliative care should improve the quality of life of the incurably ill and dying and attenuate their pain and suffering. It also helps their families and other close people.
Palliative care is applied in the cases in which the current medicine is not able to cure the disease and it should secure a dignified dying and decease, Prymula said.
The European project would set the functioning of hospital palliative care and its possible connection with home care.
The project is supposed to run until 2020. Afterwards, this scheme should work in all hospitals, Prymula said.
Hospitals will get 65 million crowns in total for the preparation of the palliative care model and another eight million will go to private providers. There is also a programme for hospices that are linked to hospitals, he added.
The largest public General Health Insurance Company (VZP) has a project to test the functioning of mobile hospice care.
As of next year, the doctors and nurses’ care of the terminally ill in their homes should be included in the directive on the financial coverage of health care and insurance companies would cover it. A lump sum per day should be paid.
Besides, the Together till the End project, supported by the Avast Endowment Fund, is supposed to improve the situation. It focuses on the creation of a hospital palliative care programme and a palliative expert team and on training of personnel.
So far 18 hospitals have joined it.
Some 105,000 people annually die in the Czech Republic with a population of 10.5 million, most of them or 68 percent in healthcare facilities.
About a half of them die in hospitals, almost one-tenth in long-term care facilities and under 3 precent in hospices. Only about 26 percent of people die at home or in senior homes and other institutions.
More than 70,000 people annually need palliative care.
