Special Issue "Sustainable Healthcare: How to Assess and Improve Healthcare Structures' Sustainability"

A special issue of Sustainability (ISSN 2071-1050). This special issue belongs to the section "Health and Sustainability".

Deadline for manuscript submissions: 20 September 2021.

Special Issue Editors

Prof. Dr. Francisco Ródenas Rigla
E-Mail Website
Guest Editor
Polibienestar Research Institute, University of Valencia, 46022 Valencia, Spain
Interests: sustainability of welfare systems; analysis of public policies; long-term care; aging and ICT; sociospatial stratification and inequality
Prof. Dr. Jordi Garcés Ferrer
E-Mail Website
Guest Editor
Polibienestar Research Institute, University of Valencia, 46022 Valencia, Spain
Interests: social policyl; ong term care; social innovation; ageing
Dr. Ascensión Doñate-Martínez
E-Mail Website
Guest Editor
Polibienestar Research Institute, University of Valencia, 46022 Valencia, Spain
Interests: chronic conditions; multimorbidity; palliative care; patient-centred care; population ageing; health policies

Special Issue Information

Dear Colleagues,

This Special Issue of Sustainability focuses on a fundamental topic in today’s society, as demonstrated by the COVID-19 pandemic: the sustainability of healthcare systems. The pandemic highlighted the weaknesses of the health system, subjecting it to harsh stress tests. In the global health crisis, the older population and chronic patients have been the focus of the attention of health systems as they are high-risk groups, highlighting the need to improve the structures and protocols aimed at the most vulnerable. Health and care systems have been working under pressure during these last few months, significantly affecting their effectiveness and efficacy. All these aspects must act as a red flag to point out the value of healthcare systems to approach citizens’ wellbeing and to protect this crucial aspect for the current and future sustainability of Welfare States.  

Demographic change, with the aging of societies, and epidemiological change, with an increase in chronic diseases, is unquestionable globally. Among the consequences of these changes is the increase in multimorbidity and fragility, which means an increase in demand for health and social services. This scenario involves complexity in the management and organization of care, which require a structural and functional adaptation of the available health resources if we want to conserve them and make them sustainable. However, the effects of decision making in the medium- and long-term in health systems pose a great challenge without the help of technology, that is, without the use of computational tools and mathematical models. This is not a new challenge—scientists from different areas of knowledge have questioned the feasibility and sustainability of health systems for several decades. In this context, it is important to highlight the link between social and technical sciences for the advancement and implementation of current knowledge in this field.

Today’s global health crisis, derived from the COVID-19 pandemic, forces us to consider what is necessary to renew our systems and maintain them, without conditioning the response of future societies. In this Special Issue, we hope to find papers that raise responses to the challenge of sustainability of healthcare, in particular those aimed at the most vulnerable populations, such as older patients and/or those with chronic diseases, from different approaches. We are particularly interested, from an interdisciplinary and inter-institutional point of view, in the use of AI and algorithms in the field of care management, computational simulation of new care scenarios, the proposal of models to improve care for patients with chronic diseases, the development of tools for early identification, risk detection and screening, or the organization and integration of palliative care in daily clinical practice as well as end-of-life care.

Prof. Dr. Francisco Ródenas Rigla
Prof. Dr. Jordi Garcés Ferrer
Dr. Ascensión Doñate-Martínez
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All papers will be peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Sustainability is an international peer-reviewed open access semimonthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 1900 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

Keywords

  • sustainable healthcare
  • long-term care
  • chronic diseases
  • older population
  • ICT applied to healthcare

Published Papers (1 paper)

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Research

Article
Living Longer with Disability: Economic Implications for Healthcare Sustainability
Sustainability 2021, 13(8), 4467; https://doi.org/10.3390/su13084467 - 16 Apr 2021
Cited by 1 | Viewed by 410
Abstract
This work focuses on the economic implications of the relationship between life expectancy, the number of years lost to disability and per-capita total health expenditure. The primary goal of the paper is to identify and plot the correlation between healthcare expenditure and the [...] Read more.
This work focuses on the economic implications of the relationship between life expectancy, the number of years lost to disability and per-capita total health expenditure. The primary goal of the paper is to identify and plot the correlation between healthcare expenditure and the global increase in life expectancy, in order to assess if, and how, the way longer average lifespans are achieved affects healthcare sustainability. Datasets regarding the United States, the European Union and the five largest emerging healthcare systems (i.e., Brazil, the Russian Federation, India, China and South Africa) were obtained from the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation and the WHO Health Expenditure Statistics Repository. All analysis was performed on 2017 data. The results of the analysis showed the number of years lost to disability to be a linear function of life expectancy at birth (male R2 = 0.61; female R2 = 0.47), and per-capita total health expenditure to be an exponential function of the number of years lost to disability (male R2 = 0.60; female R2 = 0.65). This implies that improving life expectancy via social policies bears negative consequences in terms of healthcare sustainability, unless the number of years lost to disability is reduced too. Further studies should narrow the sample of countries and causes of years lost due to disability, to better inform future policy efforts. Full article
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