The Ministry of Health has once again updated the map of health needs. The documents published in December of 2018 online at ww.mpz.mz.gov.pl are based on the data for the year 2016 and are prepared for every voivodeship in scope of 30 disease groups. A new edition of oncology and cardiology maps was also released.
The new documents constitute continuation of the maps of health needs published:
- in December of 2015 in scope of oncology and cardiology, which were the first documents of this kind and developed based on data from 2013;
- in December of 2016 for the first time for 15 of the 30 disease groups and in December of 2017 for the remaining 15 disease groups developed based on data from 2014.
The map update from December of 2018 covers basic health care, ambulatory specialist care, hospitalisation, and other scopes of provided health care benefits. In comparison to the previous map editions, they include the new areas pointed out by the experts involved in the work on development of individual documents such as the quality of the provided benefits or their availability to patients and expand upon other already presented analyses. The conducted work was based on a greater number of data sources, including data from medical registers. The methods used to create these documents remained unchanged.
During the process of updating the maps, the Ministry of Health remained in close cooperation with experts of working groups dedicated to individual areas. The documents were also presented to experts at several productive meetings. Before they were published, the documents were sent out for assessment to national and voivodeship consultants.
This was the last time for the maps to be published in their current form, i.e. large multiple-page documents. Starting in 2019, the successive updates will be published exclusively on the publicly accessible digital platform (not requiring registration): the System and Implementation Analysis Database. Thanks to the automation of data processing, the time required for updating will be considerably reduced. The main purposes of digitalisation of the maps is to make their content easier to access, facilitate the data search process, and allow for comparison of data from various years.
The platform is currently in the final stages of development and will be fully functional by the second quarter of this year, i.e. will include most of the data transferred from the maps of health needs published before 31 December 2018. The data will also be presented in form of interactive maps prepared with the tool of the Centre of Spatial Analyses of Public Administration developed by the Head Office of Geodesy and Cartography.