Depressive and anxiety disorders should be in coordinated care. Doctors will get a tool to help diagnose and determine treatment

- There is no doubt in my mind that the absolute flagship and strategic direction of the health care system should be to increase comprehensiveness of care and coordination. I understand comprehensiveness as the ability to fully secure a patient's needs in one place or by one provider. The patient is tired of going from office to office and from facility to facility in search of a plan for diagnosis, treatment and care," said Dr. Malgorzata Galazka-Sobotka, director of the Institute for Healthcare Management at Lazarski University, during a conference summarizing the conclusions of the Health Care Forum after a quarter.

One of the important demands related to coordinated care is that anxiety disorders and depressive disorders be included in this model in the PCP. This is because these are the most common mental health problems, and at the same time they are chronic and recurrent in nature. This means continuing treatment for many years. However, psychiatrists are not able to consult all patients who require it on an ongoing basis. It is therefore important to relieve the burden on mental health clinics. According to experts, a patient with a stable course of the disease should come under the care of a PCP.

The answer to psychiatry's challenges is to reform it and remodel it into community-based care as the primary care in the field.

- Psychiatry reform is underway and there is no telling when it will be completed. The good part is that we have started to talk about it at all. Mental health has become a topic of health discussion, because it is a problem perhaps not as visible as heart disease, but just as deadly. The severity of these problems has increased greatly in recent years," noted Agnieszka Leszczynska, president of Angelini Pharma Poland.

Since the completion of psychiatry reform is a distant prospect and the inclusion of anxiety and depressive disorders in the coordinated care model a real and timely challenge, PCPs should have the tools to diagnose depressive and anxiety disorders based on the patient's history and initiate appropriate therapeutic management to start treatment.

- Our company has been educating GPs about psychiatric care for fifteen years. We have 4,000 psychiatrists and nearly 40 million Poles. It is not physically possible for a patient to get to a psychiatrist in even a month. Half of them, because of embarrassment, will never go to such a specialist. Instead, they will go to a primary care doctor, who, in addition to being an expert in diabetology, cardiology and many others, must also be an expert in psychiatry. This is where the stairs begin, as it is the most undiagnosed area of health. "In Karpacz, we announced that we will prepare an educational platform called 'Diagnose and Treat', which will help the doctor very quickly check whether the patient actually has anxiety or depression and determine how to treat it," said Agnieszka Leszczynska.

The application was indeed created. The Polish Psychiatric Association and the national consultant in psychiatry worked on its development. The tool suggests to the doctor which molecules he can use within a given patient profile. Importantly, it is non-commercial in nature. The application does not provide the names of drugs, but the international names of substances. In mid-December, its testing began. As of February, it will go into public circulation.