Almazov National Medical Research Centre became the venue for the joint conference Rehabilitation Problems in the Epoch of Patient-Oriented Medicine.
Veronika Skvortsova, the Russian Minister of Health, highly praised the activities of the Health Working Group and their initiatives in her welcome letter to the Forum participants.
“It is extremely important that in 2018 medical rehabilitation has become one of the areas for bilateral cooperation within the framework of improving health management technologies, including the training of specialists,” she emphasized in her message read out by her Assistant, Professor Lyalya Gabbasova.
The conference started with a welcome address by the leaders of the working group from the Russian and German sides: Prof. Evgeny Shlyakhto, Academician of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Director General of the Almazov Centre, President of the Russian Society of Cardiology, and Andrea Fischer, former Federal Minister of Health, Germany.
The co-chairs of the group stressed that the problem of rehabilitation was obvious to the professional community of both countries. Today, the fate of a patient and patient’s quality of life depend not only on successful high-tech care but also on the effectiveness of further rehabilitation.
“The rehabilitation problem is now embedded in the system of patient-oriented medicine, which is the priority for the Russian Ministry of Health,” said Evgeny Shlyakhto. “The main goal is not the treatment process but the end result.”
In particular, the Almazov Centre implements the principles of an integrated patient-oriented approach that addresses the problems of providing high-tech equipment, using advanced technologies, implementing the clinical guidelines and focusing on the end result of treatment and rehabilitation. A single approach allows building a three-stage system of medical care for adults and children, including newborns, within the same institution. In Germany, there is a similar three-stage, very effective rehabilitation system, including the widespread introduction of device-based training methods and telemetry patient monitoring systems. There is a demand for this experience in Russia.
Eight meetings were held during the two days of the conference. The program covered the critical issues in the field of rehabilitation: from legislative aspects of providing rehabilitation care to specific issues of nosology, the problems and actual areas for the development of rehabilitation in cardiology, oncology, traumatology and orthopedics, neurology, and infectious diseases.
The conference was attended by Dr. Eltje Aderhold, Consular General of the Federal Republic of Germany in St. Petersburg, Prof. Dr. Helmut Hahn, President of Koch-Mechnikov Forum, Dr. Robert Aures, Senior Legal Secretary, State Ministry of Health and Care, Free State of Bavaria, leading experts in various fields of medicine, representatives of the Russian and German Ministries and institutions of healthcare control.