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Health Care Structural Planning
The Austrian Hospitals and Major Equipment Plan (ÖKAP/GGP)
Since 1997, an important instrument of health care structural policy has been the Austrian Hospitals and Major Equipment Plan (Österreichischer Krankenanstalten- und Großgeräteplan, ÖKAP/GGP). This legally binding plan, originally conceived with targets for the year 2005, has been updated and expanded several times since its inception.
The objectives of the ÖKAP/GGP are to maintain the high quality of health care provision, to adapt the hospital structure to meet future health care requirements and to increase economic efficiency in the hospital sector.
The hospital plan regulates the fund hospitals’ locations, specialisation structures, the upper limits of total beds in individual hospitals and provinces and the trans-regional provision of services in selected areas. More detailed determinations are established in the provincial hospital plans, which must remain within the framework of the ÖKAP/GGP stipulations.
The major equipment plan establishes the type and quantity of large-scale medical-technical devices per hospital, based primarily on the specialisation structure of the hospital as a criterion of structural quality.
Austrian Health Care Structural Plan (ÖSG)
While the ÖKAP/GGP represents traditional location and capacity planning (beds, specialty structure, provisions of large medical technical equipment) for publicly funded hospitals, the ÖSG follows a new sort of planning methodology - the so-called service provision planning. This means that the minimum supply or the required minimum amount of medical services (based on about 400 pre-defined service bundles) for the care of the population in each of the 32 established health care regions is established on the basis of comprehensive model and prognosis calculations. Sophisticated and/or rarely required services will be distributed among four care zones. In principle, the provision of services can take place irrespective of location or organisational form- inpatient or outpatient, in hospitals or in private practices, in public or in private health care institutions. The prerequisite for the provision of services is that certain structural quality criteria (especially available personnel and equipment, as well as minimum frequencies) be met.
The ÖSG encompasses not only the hospital are, but in principle the entire health care structure (intramural and extramural areas, acute and long- term care incl. rehabilitation) and furthermore defines criteria for effective management at the interfaces between these areas of care. The ÖSG is thus an important structural policy instrument for the development of an integrated system of health care provision.
For reasons of current data availability, the ÖSG for 2006 contains service provision planning only for the area of acute inpatient care. The other areas of care are portrayed as they now are because, in the case of the outpatient are, for example, available date is as yet insufficient. In any case, even just the current situation provides an overview of the existing care situations in the various regions and shows where there is a need for change. In connection with the planned successive introduction of a comparable documentation of diagnoses and procedures in all areas of health care, service provision planning will be continually expanded to cover all other areas.
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