>> After the opening by Dr. Andrea Siebenhofer-Kroitzsch, head of the Institute for General Medicine and Evidence-Based Health Services Research (IAMEV) at the Medical University of Graz, and her colleague Dr. Martin Sprenger, MPH, and Priv.-Doz. Dr. Stefan Korsatko, MBA, this year's “Primary Care Congress” offered a successful mix of interdisciplinary speakers. These provided deep and sometimes emotional insights into the various areas of primary care that the pandemic has turned upside down in recent months. In his keynote, Sprenger offered a look back at numbers, data and facts on the development of the corona pandemic, not only in Austria. This was supplemented by the keynote speech by Jan de
Maesseneer (Genth University) and Maria van den Muijsenbergh (Radboud University) with the title: “Put the horse before the cart: Investing in health requires investing in health workforce.”
This was followed by various webinars, such as that of Diederik Aarendonk (European Forum for Primary Care - EFPC), who expanded on the topic of de Maesseneer and van den Muijsenbergh, while Dr. Franz Allerberger (Austrian Agency for Health and Food Safety GmbH Vienna) gave a presentation on the current state of knowledge on Covid-19. Sprenger and Korsatko from MedUni Graz finally explained how the Alpine country should prepare for the 2020/2021 virus season. At the end of the webinar block, Christoph Pammer (Medius) and Heinz Novosad (OEFOP) called for social work to network more closely in view of the pandemic - but not at some point, but now!
For the final panel discussion
invited the organizer trio (Siebenhofer-Kroitzsch, Sprenger and Korsatko) Mag. Dr. Juliane Bogner-Strauß, the State Councilor for Education, Society, Health and Care for the State of Styria, and Dr. Franz Allerberger, the chairman of AGES. The regional councilor warned that right now it is about “the best cooperation of all care options”, namely a useful, adequate combination of the lowest-threshold offer - the telephone health advice on 1450, which has been introduced throughout Austria since November 2019 - via resident doctors and the hospitals to a “best point of care” approach. But citizens are also called upon: In addition to adhering to the mask requirement and distance rules, they should say goodbye to the habit, which has increasingly developed in recent years, of going to work or school even though they already feel sick.
But with more serious complaints, citizens have to see a doctor in private practice. The how Korsatko described. Not only is he a lecturer at IAMEV and, together with motivated people from various health professions, he founded the Austrian Forum for Primary Care in 2016 (of which he has been the first federal spokesman ever since), but he is also a resident doctor at the Medius primary care center in Graz. Since the beginning of the pandemic - according to Korsatko - a so-called infection area has been established in which only Covid-19 patients can be diagnosed, "separate and parallel to normal operations". There is also a triage of patients at the entrance door, as we also have to keep an eye on the asymptomatic patients. Korsatko: “For us, spatial separation is even possible with a second entrance.” This is certainly not possible with smaller primary care units; they would have to solve triage with a temporal separation.
In addition, a protection strategy with a traffic light system was introduced that shows which employees have to wear which protective clothing and when. In addition, a separate test container was put into operation at the beginning of November in order, on the one hand, to reduce queues and, on the other hand, to better separate patients and those coming for the test. With the start of the test container, PCR and antigen tests for asymptomatic people would only be carried out here, while those patients with symptoms would continue to be treated in the infection area. <<