Functioning of care-and-treatment health centers and nursing-and-care health centers illustrated by the Province of Lublin.

A commonly felt problem in the Polish system of health protection is the lack of long-term care in the properly functioning family. With the introduction of a new system of health insurance, chronically ill patients with an established diagnosis and therapy and not requiring hospitalization are considered not eligible for hospital care. It concerns a big group of patients with a considerable limitation of self-caring activities. The demographic data imply that this problem is growing systematically. A bigger and bigger part of the society is at their post-production age in which many diseases limiting independent functioning develop. Problems arising from the disease influence not only the family but also the whole society. In many cases a chronic disease leads to disability, which results in the requirement for nursing care. Year by year there is an increasing number of people requiring everyday at least 2-hour nursing care. A considerable number of these patients qualify for stationary long-term care. There is a great deficit of services in the long-term care at present. New principles of financing health services force the health care settings to use the beds in the optimum way, to make a quick diagnosis and treatment without extending the patient's stay in hospital by a period that would not influence the change of health condition. Therefore, long-term care should comprise about 60% of the whole potential of stationary care. In our country the deficit of stationary forms of long-term care is felt. It creates the opportunity for many hospitals providing the short-term care to transform to treatment-care settings or nursing-and-care settings which will be performing longterm care.