|
In health care, an orphan patient is a patient who has been "lost" within the system or has no primary provider overseeing their care. Usually, the primary provider is a general practitioner who takes care of some of the basic health needs and then refers to a specialist for complicated medical problems. Thus, orphan patients are sometimes referred to as "no-family-doctor" patients. The view from insiders and health care providers is that orphan patients tend to receive inferior care compared to those who have a "gatekeeper" coordinating the medicine. The Wordspy entry for this phrase is as follows (): ==Contributing factors== There are multiple factors that are contributing to the orphan patient problem in North America. Some of them include: *problems maintaining a supply of qualified health practitioners *providing access to them where and when they are needed most *a growing population of patients *an aging population of patients *a sicker population of patients (particularly with diabetes and obesity being rampant in North America) *a more "medicalized" population of patients (expectations for medical care are higher than ever, and we have more defined diseases to treat) *increasing complexity of treatments for the diseases we have always known about (standard-of-care treatment for heart attack is much more labour-intensive now than it was even a decade ago) The orphan patient problem has only been recognized in the media recently. Older medical references mention the term 'orphan patient' using a different definition, specifically patients with an orphan disease. For example, New England Journal of Medicine mentioned patients with orphan diseases as orphan patients in 1988: N Engl J Med. 1988 Mar 10;318(10):646. The orphan patient. Shelley WB, Shelley ED. Publication Types: Letter PMID 3344016 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Orphan patient」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
|