As a nurse working in the psychiatry ward, I do see the demand for mental health care on the rise and the supply is not unfortunately meeting the demand. We need more services with an easy and fast access. This means we have to look at modern way of how we can provide services equally to the whole county. One of the ways to do this is to exploit the possibility of the use of video calls; this gives patients an easy access to care from everywhere.
The most important function for the new county council is to provide functional services for the whole area in health, social and rescue fields. Everyone needs to be able to get a service when they need it. We need to find new ways to provide social and health services, bring them to the 2020 -century, so that we can ensure better services in the future as well.
Training of health and social workers, managers, and investing to the well-being at work is going to be important in the future. I believe that when workers feel valued and they have a conducive work environment they will provide better quality service.
The public service has a long waiting line which is affecting to health of the people. Giving patients possibility to use private services as well as public services will increase the quality of the service which the patient is getting. I believe the patient is the best expert in deciding where he will get the service he needs.
I believe that investing to preventive care will give better life to a patient as well as reduce the need of an expensive special health care. We need to start investing to our mental and physical wellbeing more in early stages so that; health issue can be prevented from getting more serious and expensive. In the case of a very difficult and unfortunately health issue, we need to have a good rehabilitation plans so that a patient’s life quality can be increased and preventing another life threatening experience.
The purpose of the county council is to provide services with the same or smaller budget than before. For this reason, we need to have sustainable economy in the area. We need to view different ways how we can create cost savings when we move to bigger health, social and rescue areas. I believe one of the first tasks in the county council is to compare different IT software’s and unite them to one working system. This will definitely cut cost.
We are already paying a lot of taxes in Finland and I do not want to see any new taxes presented to us. Taxing right will make areas more bureaucratic which will affect to finances. I want area council to be as slim as possible without bureaucracy so that the money allocated to the area will go to actual needed services.