We know that in Romania there is a real difficulty in getting in touch with a doctor when we are faced with a medical situation, no matter how serious it is. There is a dwindling number of practising doctors, with only 700 emergency doctors in Romania.
The options currently available to solve a sudden medical problem are as follows:
- call the family doctor who answers if it is during office hours;
- call a friend/relative doctor;
- we call 112 asking for a rescue, sometimes unnecessarily consuming important resources from the state budget;
- Using our own transport, we go to the emergency room of the nearest hospital, where, if our medical situation is not life-threatening, we can wait several hours until a doctor is available.
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Statistics for 2022 show that more than 70% of referrals to Emergency Departments (EDs) in large hospitals are minor cases that can be handled online. Also, on the single emergency number 112, during the same year, out of 10 million calls, about 1.5 million were non-emergency medical calls, calls that overwhelm and choke the system with situations for which 112 does not yet have a protocol. This has prompted the STS (Special Telecommunications Service) to initiate an extensive media campaign to inform and educate the entire population, so that we all call 112 only for EMERGENCY medical cases. This campaign ran for two months last autumn.
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Together with the National Red Cross Society of Romania, eTELEDOC has developed a digital platform that can be the basis for the establishment of a National Permanence Centre, following the model of those already existing in Italy, Germany and Finland, to take over and manage non-emergency situations, with the allocation of the unique short number 116117 dedicated to this medical case throughout the European Union.
In this way, anyone facing a sudden medical situation can access the 116117 service 24 hours a day and be put in direct contact with a doctor able to offer advice, support or guidance depending on the medical situation. This provides expert triage of all requests to the on-call rooms, decongesting these services which are meant to deal only with life-threatening emergencies.
The platform has 4 work streams, namely: adult consultations, paediatric consultations, English consultations and hearing and speech impaired consultations, for the last one the subtitling attribute is implemented.
Access to the doctor will be done either in the app via video call or by telephone by dialling the short number 116117 from any type of telephone, in any area of the country, on a 24-hour basis. Doctors from the specialties of general medicine/family medicine will work on the platform. Consultations will be paid for by the National Health Insurance House, following the model of the statements made for the work of family doctors in the Centres of Permanence.