Social Innovative Approaches on Health Care: Evidence from Home Hospitalization in Portugal—the Elvas Study

In Portugal, the health-care system crisis has given rise to a heated debate about the State’s role in ensuring health-care access and has raised the emergence of innovative measures. Home hospitalization is one modality of assistance that ensures the health care provider with differentiation, complexity, and intensity of hospital level, for a limited period, depending on the expression of patients will and gains in emotional comfort. Home hospitalization changes the State’s role as sponsor, regulator and provisor of goods and services that materialize in Portugal, the universal right to free health care. Thus, with in-home hospitalization, the State shares responsibilities in health care with civil society, and she begins to retake responsibilities that State had relieved her from, in the past. The purpose of this chapter is to analyse and understand how hospitalization at home can become an innovative tool in health policies and how it can transform State’s role while main provider of health care in Portugal, especially for those in need, and how it can also transform civil society’s role in preventing social risk. Providing health care exclusively through public institutions is politically and economically tough; the experience of home hospitalization in Elva’s municipality and the data that our research collected seem to demonstrate that home hospitalization can be a civil society rebuilder and can be a relief to State’s efforts and it can reinforce the importance of balancing the State, market and civil society triangle.