Quality Of Healthcare In The Aftermath Of The Covid 19 Pandemic

The COVID-19 pandemic has put massive stress on healthcare professionals’ formal training, their creed to do no harm, and the patient safety movement. COVID-19 affects all aspects of daily life and healthcare’s organizational culture and values. Healthcare institutions experience absenteeism, change in commerce patterns, and interrupted supply/delivery in this context. It has also revealed the extensive amounts of data needed for population health management, as well as the opportunities afforded by mainstreaming telehealth and virtual care capabilities, thus making the implementation of health IT essential in the post-pandemic era. Quality of Healthcare in the Aftermath of the COVID-19 Pandemic clarifies how healthcare professionals might provide their services differently than treating a patient through its vicinity with multiple providers. It examines the notion that healthcare education requires a pack of healthcare workers from varied educational backgrounds and training levels for the nuances of a disease. Covering topics such as blockchain technology, power density analysis, and supply chain, this book is a valuable resource for undergraduate and extended degree program students, graduate students of healthcare quality and health services management, healthcare managers, health professionals, researchers, professors, and academicians.

The Covid pandemic has led us into an upheaval that has made us question the certainties underlying what it means to be a human being in our age; the ability to control medical and social facts through evidence. For the first-time western and developed countries have had to confront what many populations from the developing world (Africa. Latin America, etc) face on a daily basis with HIV and Ebola, etc. The Interconnectedness of Globalization has been the real disseminating catalyst of COVID 19, and many scientists wonder if this virus is the result of the Anthropocene age, with its indisputable lack of respect for the natural ecosystems. The virus has demonstrated that our frailty is only skin deep, and it has not only brought death, despair, but it has broken our interdependency as human beings, by imposing self- isolation as well as creating new ways of connections so that safety cannot imply loneliness. In this book, the coping strategies that originate from the multiple languages of care such as narrative, literature, science, philosophy, art, digital science are shown not only as reflective tools to promote health but also wellbeing amongst carers, patients, students, and citizens of our planet Earth. These strategies should be supported by the decision makers since they are low-cost investments necessary to make the health care system work. They however require a change of cultural paradigm. This book is a useful toolkit for patients, citizens and care services physicians who want to learn more on how to live better with this new world.

Health care is everywhere under tremendous pressure with regard to efficiency, safety, and economic viability - to say nothing of having to meet various political agendas - and has responded by eagerly adopting techniques that have been useful in other industries, such as quality management, lean production, and high reliability. This has on the whole been met with limited success because health care as a non-trivial and multifaceted system differs significantly from most traditional industries. In order to allow health care systems to perform as expected and required, it is necessary to have concepts and methods that are able to cope with this complexity. Resilience engineering provides that capacity because its focus is on a system’s overall ability to sustain required operations under both expected and unexpected conditions rather than on individual features or qualities. Resilience engineering’s unique approach emphasises the usefulness of performance variability, and that successes and failures have the same aetiology. This book contains contributions from acknowledged international experts in health care, organisational studies and patient safety, as well as resilience engineering. Whereas current safety approaches primarily aim to reduce or eliminate the number of things that go wrong, Resilient Health Care aims to increase and improve the number of things that go right. Just as the WHO argues that health is more than the absence of illness, so does Resilient Health Care argue that safety is more than the absence of risk and accidents. This can be achieved by making use of the concrete experiences of resilience engineering, both conceptually (ways of thinking) and practically (ways of acting).

Almost half a century ago, policy leaders issued the Declaration of Alma Ata and embraced the promise of health for all through primary health care (PHC). That vision has inspired generations. Countries throughout the world—rich and poor—have struggled to build health systems anchored in strong PHC where they were needed most. The world has waited long enough for high-performing PHC to become more than an aspiration; it is now time to deliver. The COVID-19 (Coronavirus) pandemic has facilitated the reckoning for that shared failure—but it has also created a once-in-a-generation opportunity for transformational health system changes. The pandemic has shown policy makers and ordinary citizens why health systems matter and what happens when they fail. Bold reforms now can prepare health systems for future crises and bring goals such as universal health coverage within reach. PHC holds the key to these transformations. To fulfill that promise, however, the walk has to finally match the talk. Walking the Talk: Reimagining Primary Health Care after COVID-19 outlines how to get there. It charts an agenda to reimagined, fit-for-purpose PHC. It asks three questions about health systems reform built around PHC: Why? What? How? The characteristics of high-performing PHC are precisely those that are most critical for managing the pressures coming to bear on health systems in the post-COVID world. The challenges include future outbreaks and other emergent threats, as well as long-term structural trends that are reshaping the environments in which systems operate in noncrisis times. Walking the Talk highlights three sets of megatrends that will increasingly affect health systems in the coming decades: • Demographic and epidemiological shifts • Changes in technology • Citizens’ evolving expectations for health care. Reimagined PHC systems will be equipped through optimized system design, financing, and delivery to ensure high-quality services, care to address patients’ needs, fairness and accountability, and resilient systems.

Health and Biomedical Informatics is a rapidly evolving multidisciplinary field; one in which new developments may prove crucial in meeting the challenge of providing cost-effective, patient-centered healthcare worldwide. This book presents the proceedings of MEDINFO 2015, held in São Paulo, Brazil, in August 2015. The theme of this conference is ‘eHealth-enabled Health’, and the broad spectrum of topics covered ranges from emerging methodologies to successful implementations of innovative applications, integration and evaluation of eHealth systems and solutions. Included here are 178 full papers and 248 poster abstracts, selected after a rigorous review process from nearly 800 submissions by 2,500 authors from 59 countries. The conference brings together researchers, clinicians, technologists and managers from all over the world to share their experiences on the use of information methods, systems and technologies to promote patient-centered care, improving patient safety, enhancing care outcomes, facilitating translational research and enabling precision medicine, as well as advancing education and skills in Health and Biomedical Informatics. This comprehensive overview of Health and Biomedical Informatics will be of interest to all those involved in designing, commissioning and providing healthcare, wherever they may be.

COVID-19 Infection -- Risk Factors -- Impact on Healthcare Workers and Hospitals -- Impact on Primary Care and Specialty Care -- Telemedicine -- COVID-19 Truths, Lies and Consequences -- Persistent Medical Problems -- The Way Forward.

The COVID-19 pandemic has led to radical transformations in the organisation and delivery of health and care services across the world. In many countries, policy makers have rushed to re-organise care services to meet the surge demand of COVID-19, from re-purposing existing services to creating new ‘field’ hospitals. Such strategies signal important and sweeping changes in the organisation of both ‘COVID’ and ‘non-COVID’ care, whilst asking more fundamental questions about the long-term organisation of care ‘after COVID’. In some contexts, the pandemic has exposed the fragilities and vulnerabilities of care systems, whilst in others, it has shown how services are organised to be more resilient and adaptive to unanticipated pressures. The COVID-19 pandemic presents a rare opportunity to examine empirically and to develop new theoretical frameworks on how and why health systems adapt to such unusual and intense pressures. International contributors consider how responses to COVID-19 are transforming the organisation and governance of health and care services and explore questions around strategic leadership at local, regional, national and transnational level. The book offers unique insight and analysis on the dynamics of policy-making, the organisation and governance of care organisations, the role of technologies in governing, the changing role of professionals and the possibilities for more resilient care systems.

Healthcare quality (HQ) became eminent during the COVID-19 crisis. Despite the efforts made by the Ministry of Health in Oman, the country faced several challenges, such as a lack of available funds and patients perceived in a negative manner which hindered their treatment experience. The study examines factors affecting HQ using the SERVQUAL model; patient satisfaction in Omani public hospitals, including healthcare quality, resources availability (RA), and healthcare facility preparedness (HFP); and the moderation effect of the perceived risk of COVID-19 pandemic. This research uses a mixed method with a sample size of 387 patients (quantitatively) selected using probability random sampling of 8 patients (qualitatively) who visited public hospitals The findings from the quantitative analysis reveals that the tangibility and RA had insignificant effect on the HQ. The moderation effect of perceived risk of COVID-19 between HQ, RA, HFP and patient satisfaction was insignificant. The results of the qualitative analysis indicated other factors that affected patient satisfaction, including communication, helpfulness, compassion, physician professionalism, patient-doctor contact, waiting time, atmosphere, and cleanliness. The study proposed a strategy for technical categories that include professional skills, service outcomes and concrete quality aspects, and functional categories. The study has also recommended implications for further investigation.