Suchergebnisse

The increased demand for health services and the inclusion of new aspects in what is culturally considered "health and health care" represent a significant challenge for the current health care system and health care practice model in Catalonia. Determining health care needs and providing the right responses to them should not only be the job of experts. Rather, it should involve the participation of all the agents who live with and in the health care system every day. The aim of this article is to point out the importance of the perceptions of the agents involved in health care for planning and decision-making in health policies. A summary of the integrated perspectives of the public, professionals, and managers from the Catalan health care system is presented. Such perspectives can reveal the agreements and disagreements concerning the dimensions of health care participants define as important: health resources, health care processes, and the relationship between professionals and users.

The current heath care system in Colombia has within it many barriers that delay the timely diagnosis and treatment of breast cancer. Most women do not recognize these barriers nor do they understand that they can be changed. They still lack the basic education to identify these barriers and to navigate the system so they can receive the quality health care they deserve. We call this phenomenon "normalization of health care system barriers." Our own study seeks to understand both real and perceived barriers that hinder women who live in Medellin, Colombia, from receiving timely breast cancer diagnosis and treatment. This is qualitative study utilizes the STRAUSSian grounded theory approach, in which 13 women between the ages of 24 years and 77 years were interviewed. All participants came from different socio-cultural and economic backgrounds, according to maximum variation criteria from PATTON. The data were analyzed using Atlas.ti software. The analysis identified two phenomena: 1. the existence of barriers in the complex Colombian health care system; 2. the willingness of the women interviewed to accept this lower level of health care as normal. We urge the women to become empowered to challenge the "status quo" in order to save their own lives and the lives of countless others through early diagnosis and treatment. Once this paradigm of the "normalization of health care system barriers" is broken down, these women could improve their quality of life by being able to make wiser choices about successfully navigating the current health care system and being able to select health care providers themselves.