[The Day Service: a novel structure for the outpatient]

In our hospitals, diagnostic and therapeutic unbloody technologies allow the development of day care services in substitution for usual hospitalization. The Day Service, as like other daily services, is an organization of the outpatient structure, combining day care and simple services, into a complex clinical situation. A complex outpatient treatment (profile) identifies an "outpatient standard package" in accordance to a specific pathology or diagnostic symptomatology. The hospital clinician is responsible of the possible path as patient's occasion may require. Facilitation of burocratic procedure and more clinical appropriatness for outpatient care represent the best model of welfare practice. Reduction of many medically "improper" cases is another goal reached in this project. The Day Service model, nowadays present in the National Health Service as well, has been born in the Azienda Ospedaliera Universitaria of Ferrara, from diagnostic-therapeutic and economic uniform criteria of procedure packages to complex patients.