Discussing the relationship between quality care and cost-effective care in Swiss pediatric wound care.
The growing individual and public demand for high-quality care within a context of restricted budgets dominates the political as well as medical agenda. This demand for "quality care" has developed an "industry" and lobby relating to auditing practice even in the small subpopulation of pediatric surgical patients. With children, complex and nonhealing wounds are quite rare, but there are pressures to provide modern and high-quality wound care even in Switzerland. Thus, in accordance with practice in neighboring countries, guidelines for wound care have been established in the Swiss healthcare sector. Their validity and reliability in the context of cost-effective versus quality care are critically discussed in this paper.
Fette
Andreas
A
Children's Hospital Wound Council, Department of Paediatric Surgery, Children's Hospital, Spitalstrasse, CH-6000 Lucerne/16, Switzerland. andreas.fette@gmx.de
D002648:Child; D003362:Cost-Benefit Analysis; D017048:Health Care Costs; D006801:Humans; D017410:Practice Guidelines as Topic; D015203:Reproducibility of Results; D013557:Switzerland; D014945:Wound Healing; D014947:Wounds and Injuries / Q000191:economics / Q000628:therapy*