Customers demand products that yield clear health benefits in everyday use, not just in the controlled setting of clinical trials. We focus our resources on developing medicines and devices that can produce positive real-world outcomes for patients and healthcare providers. Traditional approach to patient assessment, using clinical and laboratory evaluation, is largely based on observer ratings by health professionals. In the ‘medical model’, there is an optimal level of functioning and everybody below this could be assumed to suffer ill health. However if these cases are examined carefully, physically-disabled individuals could be found with better quality of life than individuals with optimal functioning, as quality of life refers to a broader concept of health than has traditionally been defined. Modern medicine is slowly beginning to recognize the importance of the perspective of the patient in health care and more investigations are needed to understand the importance of the inter-relationships among health needs, satisfaction, and quality of life.
A current definition of need that has been occasionally published in the National Health Service (NHS) documents indicates that need is the ‘capacity to benefit from health care services’. However this definition may be too restrictive as “legitimate” patient needs might be limited to those that can be easily addressed within existing health services and that are considered ‘medically necessary’, maintaining the medical model which experience suggests has proven unsatisfactory in meeting patient needs.
The pressure of political self-preservation obliges health decision makers to handle health issues with no further increase in global health budget, thus they prefer to manipulate and introduce rather strict and somewhat artificial definitions to justify shortages in resources devoted to the health sector. Unfortunately using a more restrictive definition of ‘need’ masks the larger amount of genuine health needs of the population. Satisfying all of these desired health needs would, most certainly, require more monetary resources.
The challenge therefore is to identify and target patients’ genuine needs. Mobilizing resources to meet these needs would certainly avoid further expenses, keep patients satisfied with services, and lead to better quality of life.
