Sustainable Healthcare Models Research Articles

Optimization of surgical outcomes with prehabilitation.

The concept of preparing surgical candidates with various modalities designed to increase physical, physiological, metabolic, and psychosocial reserves is known as prehabilitation. Prehabilitation has garnered significant attention in recent years as evidence grows describing benefits to clinical and quality of life outcomes. Recent research examining hospital length of stay and readmission rates provides promising findings with respect to the value of prehabilitation in economic and sustainable healthcare models. The role of prehabilitation across the surgical experience exploits common surgical wait-times and the teachable moment that many patients experience upon the identification of a surgical requirement to improve the pre-, peri-, and postoperative experience. Prehabilitation incorporates numerous systemic and regional approaches to conditioning the surgical candidate. These include exercise, nutrition, education, and/or psychosocial approaches that are intended to improve preoperative fitness and preparedness. Importantly, this also promotes and facilitates health behaviour changes not only preoperatively but during the postoperative period and over the long-term. In this paper, we briefly review the historical and current perspectives on prehabilitation and comment on opportunities for greater clinical and empirical understanding in this field.

MHealth: A Sustainable Healthcare Model for Developing World

Health is a basic requirement to improve the quality of life. Providing effective health care is an essential component towards the social and economic development of a country. A large number of people in the developing countries, particularly in rural and remote areas, remained with no or little access to health care facilities. However, recent emergence of mobile communication technologies could play in improving healthcare services. There is a great potential in using mHealth as one of the supportive systems within the healthcare sector to solve the inequalities in healthcare delivery between rural and urban hospitals. This research aims to evaluate the potentialities, issues and challenges of developing mobile healthcare system in the developing world. We have proposed a potential mHealth model based on mobile telecommunication networks. This research offers a set of guidelines to aid the implementation of a successful mobile healthcare system.

Sustainable Living In Long-term Care: For People with Dementia/Alzheimer's

Nonhome-based long-term care sustainable living arrangements for elderly people with Alzheimer's is presented. Characteristics contributing to sustainability are discussed. The ultimate goal in sustainable design for older adult communities is a people-centered model of care in environments that improve their quality of life. Without sustainable healthcare models, trying to design and build a facility that will operate efficiently over time is impossible. From the onset of care, design professionals must understand the operational function and the care modeling goals.