Medicine is becoming over-specialised and needs "multi-morbidity" physicians, a European health summit heard yesterday.
Not enough doctors are being trained to care for the increasingly inter-linked diseases that afflict an ageing population, according to Dr Thomas Plochg, a public health specialist at the University of Amsterdam, the Netherlands.
Dr Plochg set out his concerns to the European Health Forum Gastein at Bad Hofgastein, Austria.
He said: "Much effort is concentrated on innovation in the areas of knowledge, technology and structures.
"In the process, the development of professional players – e.g. cardiologists, surgeons or community physicians – and the way they professionally organise their work are being ignored or their presence and their constant adaptation to the circumstances are merely assumed."
He added: "We need to stop exploiting the existing expert model underpinning health care provision, and start exploring the reconfiguration of this model instead; ‘multimorbidity’ physicians and nurses have the future."
He told delegates: "The disease-by-disease approach we have taken thus far to curable diseases is no longer efficient. Multimorbidity is too complex an interplay of genetics and lifestyle, socioeconomics and the environment for us to be able to cure it with this old approach.
"That is why prevention and health promotion are so important. Both of these factors must not be allowed to remain the tasks of specific occupations or institutes. They must be incorporated by everyone in the health care system."
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