The main purpose of the Community Medical Research Center is to conduct community health assessment, health promotion, early diagnosis and early treatment, chronic disease treatment, special protection and long-term care, and other integrated health care for the neighboring towns of Keelung Chang Gung Hospital. In the first five-year plan, we focused on community health assessment, health promotion, early diagnosis and early treatment, and chronic disease care. In the next phase of the plan, we will maintain our original direction of community health building integration and integrate academic research into it for the benefit of more people.
We will continue to integrate primary care clinics such as local health clinics to form community health clusters to provide health assessment, disease screening, regular medical checkups, health education, primary care services, and even cloud-based health information integration to promote care for peoples health. In the future, it is hoped that this community health care group can further provide nutritional assessment and education, psycho-spiritual assessment and counseling, and provide appropriate work, recreation and rest environments, and health talks, among other activities. After the Psychiatric Integration Group joins, we will use questionnaires, electronic, mail, and paper records to collect information on all participants to facilitate subsequent research.
At present, the Center has combined with the Cancer Screening Group of Keelung Chang Gung Hospital and the Health Center to conduct various screening tests for colorectal cancer, oral cancer, cervical cancer, breast cancer, etc. Through disease screening and regular medical checkups, we can help detect cancer, chronic diseases, and metabolic-related diseases early. Further, we have to use preliminary laboratory analysis to test peoples immune function, inflammatory response, metabolism, etc. in the hope of finding some biomarkers for early diagnosis. In the future, more molecular tests for genetic and disease factors will be added, together with psychiatric evaluation to achieve early diagnosis and early treatment, as well as cross-disciplinary and interdisciplinary research objectives.
In the future planning of the integration of research talents within the hospital, in addition to the Department of Surgery, the Department of Family Medicine, and the Bone Drainage Research Center, which are already under discussion for cooperation, we are also cooperating with the Department of Cardiology, the Department of Rehabilitation, and the Department of Ophthalmology, hoping to expand the depth of research in geriatrics in addition to the original chronic disease area. We also hope to increase collaboration opportunities with researchers in other disciplines through consensus camps and international seminars to be held next year.
We provide abundant health education information, free consultation with physicians, and assistance with referrals and treatment during health education activities. This long-term accumulation of health education information can also be used as a comparison of pre and post health education effects. In the long term, we aim to investigate the association of risk factors on the incidence of chronic liver disease, chronic kidney disease, metabolic syndrome, and their interaction with the consumption of medical resources; to investigate the improvement of peoples health awareness and lifestyle by community building, health education, and health promotion interventions, and to further verify the effectiveness of these interventions on the improvement of the incidence of chronic liver disease, chronic kidney disease, and metabolic syndrome. We are continuing to develop research directions.
In view of the increasing aging of the population in Taiwan, we continue to incorporate psychiatric evaluation and dementia-related diseases into our programs. We hope that our interventions will lead to early detection of chronic diseases and referral for proper treatment. Our long-term goal is to build a community health promotion model that can be applied to verify the predictive biomarkers and risk factors before the onset of a specific disease, the potential changes in the disease and the important factors that can change the prognosis after the onset of the disease, and other important information. This module can even provide the experience of other urban-rural linkages and community medical generation studies as a reference for community medicine policies in Taiwan.
Finally, the establishment of community medical clusters and community public health clusters to cooperate with community hospitals to provide community care, in order to achieve the feasibility of medical and public health links. Community preventive care, chronic disease care, long-term care, and community health care are provided through the use of community hospitals (regional and district hospitals) to provide regional medical care and promote community medical systems, and to educate practitioners and implement two-way referral care. The medical center can engage in cross-regional medical care, acute care, medical research and teaching, and special and rare disease care. Overall, the community medical research center is expected to strengthen the epidemic prevention system, assist local public health operations, and support local health care. To establish a community health information system and link information between medical institutions and health units. We will use this information to analyze the research results and provide regional epidemiological information, which will be used as a reference direction for medical policies of the competent authorities. We also hope to establish cooperation and exchange with relevant community medicine research institutions or executive units abroad to share the process and results of each others community-based research, and to verify the commonality and uniqueness of risk factors for chronic liver disease, chronic kidney disease, and metabolic syndrome among residents of different communities in different countries.