Unidade de Medicina Geral e Familiar Omega: medicina centrada na pessoa

Abstract

Following the launching of the so-called Alpha Projects by the Lisbon and Tagus Valley Regional Health Authority in March 1996, the authors presented a preliminary draft for a practice project which they called Omega Unit. They intended to set up a high-quality, highly accessible General/Family Practice Unit in Lisbon City. The Omega Unit aimed to provide general/family medicine care, to develop graduate and post-graduate education activities for health professionals and students, as well as to develop health care research. This Unit would have clinical and financial autonomy. It would also be autonomous concerning resource management and articulation with other health care providers, and would adopt contracting as a general financing model. Continuing activity assessment was also enshrined in the project. The authors argued that the success of this initiative could strongly motivate other groups of doctors to follow a similar course of action, thus transforming in the medium run the whole panorama of primary health care in Portugal.