We often ask ourselves this. How could healthcare react to another unexpected event like one pandemic? And above all, what could be the responses of the structures in times of crisis and concentrated difficulties, also and above all considering the main health challenges, such as cardiovascular diseases?
Finding an answer is not easy. But there are increasing reports of scientific and health initiatives that aim precisely to offer valid tools in this sense, in order to be able to measure in advance what could happen. The RESIL-Card project, which has just completed one year, moves in this direction. And it focuses straight on the capabilities of response in the management and care of pathologies such as heart attacks, strokes and heart failure.
Measuring resilience
As mentioned, the objective of this initiative is to try to understand how much and how the Italian healthcare system (and not only) will be able to respond to aany health or environmental emergency.
RESIL-Card, financed by the European Commission within the EU4Health programme, aims to develop a tool capable of measuring the resilience of health systemsjust like a dynamometer, in the face of crises. The initiative involves many interlocutors who lay various “building blocks”, both social and healthcare.
For Italy, the Italian Society of Interventional Cardiology (GISE) participates on the scientific front, supported by the Research Unit on health services and systems of the Amsterdam UMC medical center (Netherlands), by the global network of interventional cardiologists We CARE (France ) and the Catalan health service CatSalut (Spain).
The first phase is completed
“The RESIL-Card project, which started last year, will allow us to understand what the weak points of health systems that could go haywire during a crisis, whatever it may be, and to draw up a series of useful indications for reduce vulnerabilities and increase the resilience of cardiovascular assistance and treatment – explains Francesco Saia, interventional cardiologist at the IRCCS University Hospital of Bologna, Policlinico Sant’Orsola”.
The three-year project, which started a year ago, is divided into: three phases.
“The first, concluded, focused on the analysis of the literature and on a screening among healthcare workers which allowed us to identify the critical issues that prevented the regular provision of cardiological care in the pandemic period – reports Alfredo Marchese, head of cardiology of the S.Maria GVM Hospital in Bari. The second, concluded, organized focus groups in the various countries involved in which the figures who make up the ‘healthcare supply chain’ participated and who established the organizational criteria for the creation of the resilience, the so-called ‘dynamometer‘which we expect to have ready, at least in a preliminary version, by spring 2025.”
Field tests
We are now close to the departure of the third and final phase of the initiative. This is an experiment that will involve professionals and healthcare institutions from Italy and Catalonia and in the end a report will be drawn up real anti-crisis planusing the experience also brought by Pierre Carli, director of the emergency emergency service (SAMU) in Paris and coordinator of the health plan of the recent Paris Olympics.
In short, what happened in the first months of the Covid-19 pandemic cannot be allowed to happen again. And for this reason experts are working on a project that aims to strengthen European healthcare systems in providing continuity of care for the diagnosis and treatment of cardiovascular patients during crises, such as pandemics, conflicts or climate challenges. The final objective of the RESIL-Card consortium (which includes, among others, the health services and systems research unit of the Amsterdam UMC medical center, the global interventional cardiologists network We CARE, the Italian Society of Interventional Cardiology GISE and the Catalan health service CatSalut) is therefore to learn from the lessons of the pandemic to develop a resilience assessment innovative to be applied to European cardiovascular care pathways. This tool will support cardiac care system stakeholders in assessing the resilience of care pathwaysas well as identifying and addressing gaps using recommended standards.
