Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) has posed unprecedented challenges to healthcare systems worldwide. The surge of COVID-19 patients forced hospitals and healthcare authorities to take strict measures to mitigate the risk of system collapse, including ad hoc spatial re-organization of existing facilities, resource re-allocation and revision of priority-setting policies. While curbing the burden of the pandemic, this has caused a shift of healthcare attention far from non-COVID-19 departments, leading to suboptimal care delivery to patients affected by other conditions. Specifically, most deferrable activities were cancelled, face-to-face outpatient visits were minimized, and even oncological surgeries were paralyzed in some hospitals, with devastating effects on both physical and psychological health of patients.
While vaccination and containment measures have been widely implemented in most countries with tangible beneficial effects on viral transmission, the continuous emergence of new variant strains threatens the success of global efforts to defeat COVID-19. Indeed, the end of the pandemic seems not to be around the corner yet, which implies an urgent call for action to reshape the framework of care delivery to efficiently adapt to the current and future challenges. New models of care are therefore needed to ensure timely and appropriate medical assistance to COVID-19, long-COVID-19 and non-COVID-19 patients simultaneously, while assuring system stability and sustainability in the long term.
Good decisions come from experience and experience, in turn, comes from “bad”, yet sometimes inevitable, decisions. Gaining awareness of the healthcare weaknesses exposed by the pandemic and scrutinizing the efforts made to achieve healthcare resilience may pinpoint important lessons to lay the foundations for novel healthcare strategies that guarantee a high-quality and safe co-existence of COVID-19- and non-COVID-19-directed assistance.
This Research Topic aims at exploring the impact of the pandemic on the access to and modalities of care for patients with conditions other than COVID-19 and proposing novel approaches to ensure continuity of care for both COVID-19 and non-COVID-19 patients concurrently in a sustainable way.
Specifically, this collection focuses on organizational changes of non-COVID-19 wards in terms of logistics and timing of medical procedures during the crisis, redistribution of activities not related to COVID-19, modifications in clinical practice protocols, solutions to manage the flow of long-COVID-19 and non-COVID-19 patients requiring medical assistance including risk stratification algorithms and resource management tools, and ultimately strategies of COVID-19 patient management favoring resource sparing and cost-effectiveness.
It will incorporate experiences of healthcare adaptation to the crisis as well as empirically-grounded proposals of healthcare innovation in the form of original articles, systematic reviews, perspective manuscripts and country reports. Scientific contributions from all medical specialties are welcome with the belief that the more the sharing, the more the knowledge, the more remarkable the growth.
Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) has posed unprecedented challenges to healthcare systems worldwide. The surge of COVID-19 patients forced hospitals and healthcare authorities to take strict measures to mitigate the risk of system collapse, including ad hoc spatial re-organization of existing facilities, resource re-allocation and revision of priority-setting policies. While curbing the burden of the pandemic, this has caused a shift of healthcare attention far from non-COVID-19 departments, leading to suboptimal care delivery to patients affected by other conditions. Specifically, most deferrable activities were cancelled, face-to-face outpatient visits were minimized, and even oncological surgeries were paralyzed in some hospitals, with devastating effects on both physical and psychological health of patients.
While vaccination and containment measures have been widely implemented in most countries with tangible beneficial effects on viral transmission, the continuous emergence of new variant strains threatens the success of global efforts to defeat COVID-19. Indeed, the end of the pandemic seems not to be around the corner yet, which implies an urgent call for action to reshape the framework of care delivery to efficiently adapt to the current and future challenges. New models of care are therefore needed to ensure timely and appropriate medical assistance to COVID-19, long-COVID-19 and non-COVID-19 patients simultaneously, while assuring system stability and sustainability in the long term.
Good decisions come from experience and experience, in turn, comes from “bad”, yet sometimes inevitable, decisions. Gaining awareness of the healthcare weaknesses exposed by the pandemic and scrutinizing the efforts made to achieve healthcare resilience may pinpoint important lessons to lay the foundations for novel healthcare strategies that guarantee a high-quality and safe co-existence of COVID-19- and non-COVID-19-directed assistance.
This Research Topic aims at exploring the impact of the pandemic on the access to and modalities of care for patients with conditions other than COVID-19 and proposing novel approaches to ensure continuity of care for both COVID-19 and non-COVID-19 patients concurrently in a sustainable way.
Specifically, this collection focuses on organizational changes of non-COVID-19 wards in terms of logistics and timing of medical procedures during the crisis, redistribution of activities not related to COVID-19, modifications in clinical practice protocols, solutions to manage the flow of long-COVID-19 and non-COVID-19 patients requiring medical assistance including risk stratification algorithms and resource management tools, and ultimately strategies of COVID-19 patient management favoring resource sparing and cost-effectiveness.
It will incorporate experiences of healthcare adaptation to the crisis as well as empirically-grounded proposals of healthcare innovation in the form of original articles, systematic reviews, perspective manuscripts and country reports. Scientific contributions from all medical specialties are welcome with the belief that the more the sharing, the more the knowledge, the more remarkable the growth.
