Poland

• John Paul II is a teaching hospital of just over 500 beds serving the Malaposka province of Poland; it is experiencing year on year growth, in part attributable to the impact of an ageing population.
• The hospital forms part of a network of health promoting hospitals which seek to extend their role and influence in primary and community care
• The strategic goal of the Malaposka healthcare programme is to improve health and quality of life through:
  • Improving the range and scale of health promotion
  • Reducing health inequalities, and improving access to medical services, and
  • improving quality and efficiency
• In contributing to this programme JP has undertaken major capital investment to modernise its health facilities
• Support from the EU in the form of Structural Funds has been essential; it has accelerated funding availability and with matched funding from other sources extended the scope and scale of modernisation
• The hospital took advantage of the EU eTEN (Deploying Trans-European eServices for All) to ensure leading edge application of funds including developing hospital at home pathways of care
• The SF programme support therefore facilitated the whole systems  technology development strategy, considerably enhanced by JP participating in EU advisory programmes including Interreg
• This has meant the investment was also better focused on the need to ensure it addressed issues of inequality and created ‘productive investment’ infrastructure
• The results have been impressive at the front line of healthcare, including:
  • State of art technology in hospital wards
  • Increased availability of diagnostic services
  • Improved quality of care and patient outcomes
  • Better research infrastructure
  • More and better communication across the healthcare systems
  • Creation of improved databases and information systems to support future planning
• Looking forward JP intends to build on this platform of investment and success to begin to extend its scope and scale of service support more widely with other hospitals and throughout primary and community care facilities; in other words move towards networking and vertical integration of care services

• Well formulated strategic goals, including extending the role of the hospital to provide primary care and community support
• Innovative application of Structural Funds to improve clinical and information technologies
• Involvement in EU wide knowledge transfer programmes
• Creating a platform for future growth and scope of healthcare delivery (vertical integration) by using SF support

• Complexity of the process for accessing Structural Funds and meeting SF project development targets
• Funds available were insufficient (at this stage) to stimulate major reform of care models (perhaps changing the balance and ratio of hospital centric services)

• This represents an important lesson in using Structural Funds to address multiple and interlinked needs:
  • Improving the quality and safety of patient care
  • Improving accessibility of care and reducing inequality
  • Producing ‘productive’ infrastructure and technology that will have indirect economic benefit
  • Providing important case material about managing the SF process
  • Learning from trans-national experience in how best to focus (SF investment.

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