Impacts of COVID-19 Pandemic on Quality Health Care
Quality healthcare refers to the efficiency and effectiveness of medical services provision. Health care aims to achieve desired outcomes without compromising on ethical issues, safety, and privacy of patients. Quality services guarantee the safety of health care providers and limit the time spent in attending to patients. The COVID 19 pandemic has affected the provision of health services due to the high number of patients affected in the country. Unlike normal times, the United States health facilities are overstretched operational capacities, therefore compromising the quality, ethics, and safety of stakeholders in the industry. Issues of staffing, telehealth expansions, and limited medical supplies are just a few challenges that affect quality health during the pandemic.
The safety of patients and health care professionals during the COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted the need for safe services. Medical staff are among the frontline responders to the pandemic, therefore, exposing them to infection (Wang, Zhou & Liu, 2020). Personal protective equipment is a necessity in health care, but the high demand during the pandemic has created a crisis. Some healthcare providers are forced to offer services without the protective devices leading to a high number of infections of physicians. Patients with other non-COVID related illnesses are also at a risk of infection during hospital visits. Most facilities have limited patient in-person appointments to ensure the safety of patients. The use of masks and sanitizers helps in reducing infection risks and promoting safety in medical facilities.
Quality health focuses on fair services depending on individual patient needs. Regular health operations dictate that medical staff should attend to patients without considering age, race, or social class. However, due to overstretched resources, the COVID- 19 pandemic has led to ethical dilemmas for physicians and patients. The increasing need for intensive care units and the use of ventilators make the available hospital capacity insufficient. Physicians now face the challenge of choosing people to allocate intensive care units. The elderly may miss out on ventilators when the gadgets are inadequate for all patients (Emmanuel et al., 2020). Such situations expose medical practitioners to ethical dilemmas of choosing people who die and those that survive the pandemic.
Efficiency and effectiveness in service delivery depending on the staffing needs of different facilities. During the pandemic, health facilities face high rates of admission and increased patients’ health demands. Currently, millions of people have contracted the virus, and a significant number face critical conditions, therefore overwhelming the existing patient-health provider’s ratio. Despite the sacrifice shown by physicians during the pandemic, the challenge of attending to individual patient needs is prevalent. Medical staff in the country work for more hours during the pandemic leading to exhaustion and reduced efficiency. The pandemic is an eye-opener for states to improve the capacity facilities and the number of health professionals.
The COVID-19 pandemic has affected the outpatient systems in most facilities due to the need for social distancing. Hospitals are a high-risk area in the contraction of the virus, making most health facilities to limit outpatient visits to critical cases. Patients with conditions that require elective hospital visits are gradually skipping services due to the fear of contracting the COVID-19 virus. COVID 19 pandemic has led to the shift in focus from patient-centered care to public health. The need to attend to collective groups of patients and public issues may lead to stress and reduced performance among health practitioners (Angelos, 2020). Limited hospital visits compromise individual patient needs and expose chronic cases to premature deaths. Timely medical care means that patients can access health care at the time of need. Limitations of outpatient services compromise the efficient delivery of medication. Telemedicine health care services are vital in bridging the gap between in-person patient contact and safe provision of services. Unfortunately, telehealth systems are likely to prioritize COVID-19 patients making chronic patients suffer. On the flip side, the challenges that the pandemic exerts on healthcare are likely to ignite the invention and improvement of telemedicine across the globe.
References
Angelos, P. (2020). Surgeons, ethics, and COVID-19: Early lessons learned. Journal of the American College of Surgeons.
Emanuel, E. J., Persad, G., Upshur, R., Thome, B., Parker, M., Glickman, A., … & Phillips, J. P. (2020). Fair allocation of scarce medical resources in the time of Covid-19.
Wang, J., Zhou, M., & Liu, F. (2020). Reasons for healthcare workers becoming infected with novel coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) in China. Journal of Hospital Infection, 105(1), 100-101.