Testing the 2017 PHC reform through pilots: Strengthening prevention and chronic care coordination

Numerous official reports have highlighted insufficient provision of preventive services within primary health care (PHC) in Poland. Other identified weaknesses include inappropriate referrals to ambulatory care that contribute to long waiting times for specialist consultations. Since mid-2018, a new model of PHC organization has been piloted and can be seen as an attempt to address some of these weaknesses. It draws on the Primary Health Care Act of 2017 and puts much more emphasis on disease prevention and health promotion within PHC as well as shifts management of common chronic conditions to multidisciplinary PHC teams. The implementation of this model has been supported by a range of financial and non-financial measures, including a special grant that helps PHC practices to adapt their IT systems to the requirements of the pilot. Yet, the overall requirements were prohibitive to most PHC practices and only 42 were eventually included in the pilot. In this paper, we describe the content of this model, the difficulties in its implementation and how they were addressed and discuss its possible effects on PHC and the health system more broadly.