Johannes Bircher
University of Bern, Switzerland
Title: Impact on Heath Economy of a New Theoretical Framework of Health: The Meikirch Model
Biography
Biography: Johannes Bircher
Abstract
In healthcare the physician’s purpose is to improve as much as possible the health of persons who are diseased. So far this was realized intuitively and by medical ethics because no valid definition of health has been available. This became complicated in the last decades because politicians introduced procedures to reduce healthcare costs. In order to create a rational basis for this conflict, I have published a new definition of health in 2020 (ihj-2020-000046). It reads: “A healthy individual must be able to meet all the demands of life. Resources for this purpose consist of a biologically given potential (physical body) and a personally acquired potential (immaterial personality). The demands of life and both potentials are continuously interacting with each other and with the social and natural surroundings. Thus, human health acts as a complex adaptive system.” Healthcare must therefore consider all five determinants of health including their interactions. Due to financial pressures, however, a practice has recently been evolved that limits care mostly to defects of the biologically given potential while largely neglecting the personally acquired potential. Also, nurses’ salaries were kept down. For these problems, the Meikirch model offers the new possibility to rationally weigh medical values against economic values. It can be trusted that by this process decision makers on both sides will in a rational process eventually find solutions that solve the conflicts between the ethics of healthcare and the saving efforts of politicians.