Published in the Annals of Family Medicine, the study shows that 73% of the home visits for each patient of these centres are made by the same doctor and 83% by the same nurse. ‘People who need home care are a highly vulnerable and often fragile group, making frequent use of emergency and ambulance services, with many hospital admissions’, says Luis González, the CAPSBE coordinator of the study and a member of IDIBAPS’ Primary Healthcare Transversal Research Group. ‘The continued relationship between patients and professionals lowers admission rates and eases pressure on the emergency system’, he adds.
The goal is for 75% of the visits to be made by the same team
Previous studies have demonstrated that continuous care by the same physician can reduce patient mortality. The new study shows that when continuity of care is at least 75%, it is associated with a 36% reduction in hospital admissions, 31% less ambulance use and 31% fewer emergency room visits.
Previously, most studies had focused exclusively on the physician’s continuous care, relegating the role of nurses to the background, despite the fact that they are the professionals with the most patient contact in home-based care. According to Sílvia Roura, the deputy manager of CAPSBE and a researcher involved in the study, ‘we have a unique healthcare system in the world, in which the entire population is assigned a physician and a top nurse for primary care, but the impact of this work model has received little study’. Antoni Sisó, another researcher who participated in the study and the head of the IDIBAPS research group, adds that ‘we have not yet sufficiently analysed the particular aspects of our primary care model’.
As explained by Carmen Herranz, the head of transversal projects at CAPSBE, an IDIBAPS researcher and the lead author of the study, ‘Our results support our continued efforts so that it is always the same professionals who visit patients and the importance of minimising visits by other professionals, even if they are on the same team’. And she concludes that ‘we need to bear in mind that the people who need home care are usually very old, with more than one chronic disease, and can have a hard time getting to a hospital’.
Professionals from the Barcelona Esquerra Primary Health Care Consortium (CAPSBE), IDIBAPS, the University of Barcelona and Hospital de la Santa Creu i Sant Pau participated in this study.
Study of reference
Carmen Herranz, Luis González-de Paz, Alicia Borrás-Santos, Sofía Alvarez, Bibiana Contreras, Nuria García, Elena Gómez, Marta Navarro, Amaya Serna, Silvia Roura-Rovira, Jaume Benavent-Àreu, Antoni Sisó-Almirall
The Annals of Family Medicine Jan 2026, 24 (1) 17-24; DOI: 10.1370/afm.240637
