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Robin Molander is right that Swedish emergency care must change. You are also right that primary care should play a larger role in Swedish healthcare, but not primarily for staff in mini-emergency rooms. It has been almost three years since I wrote about SvD Debatt myself and said that 55 percent of all the children who came to the Örebro pediatric emergency over a period of 18 months had not had to seek emergency care. I suggested a couple of steps. One of them was to strengthen primary care. But hey, I did not suggest that we schedule district physicians at night to answer the phone or receive acute patients. And for various reasons.
Unfortunately, Sweden has poor primary care. While Swedish district doctors are expected to care for patients who are often seriously ill and who in other countries would have been cared for by specialists in the hospital, district doctors represent only about 16 percent of the Swedish medical profession. In other countries, the proportion of district doctors is higher (eg Finland 30%, Netherlands 40%). Add to that the fact that most of the health centers I know of have vacant positions (Vårdanalys rapport 2018: 5, “Public access” confirms that about half of all health centers in Sweden have vacancies). Also, many people who on paper are district physicians in occupational health care or as school physicians, etc., compounding the shortage of district physicians.
