User:Nicony07/Impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on hospitals

Asia
Indonesia faced the alarming situation with relatively small number of healthcare workers, with only 4 doctors and 21 nurses per 10,000 citizens. Some hospitals were not properly testing patients for the infection. Also, the required personal protective equipment (PPE) of sufficient quality was not available. With hospital beds running out in Delhi and other cities of India, people were being forced to find ways to treat sick patients at home. And the higher demand of concentrators, essential drugs and oxygen bottles have boosted the prices making it inaccessible to people and flawed drugs with cheap prices were circulating in the market. Laboratories were overcrowded and taking several days to get the test result.

Delta variant of coronavirus was reaching to its disturbing levels in Pakistan’s biggest city Karachi, on Eid al Adha Muslim holiday, even some privately owned hospitals were rejecting the admission of new patients. In Russia, where 83% of the hospital beds were designated for the patients with COVID-19, were also occupied.

Numerous hospitals in Japan had experienced a deficiency of specialist. This persistent problem was further exposed by the pandemic last year. Doctors and nurses who were complaining about extra duty hours had reached to their limits as COVID-19 patients occupied all the available beds. In addition to the shortage of general doctors in Japan, the spread of COVID-19 has revealed a shortage of infectious disease specialists. Contrary, it has more hospital beds per capita than any other country in the world: twice as many as France and nearly five times more than in the United States. A COVID-19 infection in a hospital means a 14-day quarantine for medical staff, during which they cannot accept new in-house patients or emergency visits. And after it suffered a hospital infection in April, it had to be closed to new patients. Eight Thai hospitals were temporarily closed after patients covered up the fact of infection with Covid-19 and transmission of the virus to hospital staff. Many of the medical staff had to isolate themselves.

In the Philippines, the state-run San Lazaro Hospital in Manila City produced an average of 10,000 kilograms of infectious medical waste each month, which includes personal protective equipment (PPE), bandages, blood and urine bags, syringes, test tubes, sputum cups and histopathological waste used according to the Ministry of Health, in accordance with the guidelines of the World Health Organization (WHO). Almost 40% of nurses in private hospitals have resigned since the pandemic began, according to the Private Hospital Association of the Philippines. In the past few weeks, healthcare workers have been protesting unpaid benefits, including a special coronavirus risk allowance.

North America
North American hospitals and other medical institutions were not ready for the Covid-19 pandemic. Many hospitals face a shortage of reliable test kits, ventilators, and PPEs and each of these is essential for the prevention, diagnosis, and treatment of Covid-19. Between 2019 and 2020, the U.S. healthcare system was unable to define key elements of sharing information between interhospital, interstate, and federal partners, assessing the impact of the event in real-time to load-balancing the staff, patients and resources. In some cases, there were issues with both, the availability and distribution of resources. As COVID-19 has placed extraordinary demands on the hospital's oxygen system to provide care in an intensive care environment and used non-traditional staff and contracted to meet Demand. Most California acute care hospitals began started to put off admissions and non-urgent treatments when the COVID-19 pandemic hit.

Canadian hospitals prioritized more urgent and life-saving treatments. They retrain and transfer human resources to support the most needed areas. Compared with 2019, the number of surgeries performed in the first 16 months of the pandemic has decreased by nearly 560,000. People were virtually classified according to emergency admissions. Virtual assistance has become an important tool for primary care doctors and medical specialists and could be one of the permanent changes resulting from the pandemic. Compared with 2019, the average number of visits per day during the pandemic has decreased by 9,300. Distribution of additional Health Equipment Loan Program (HELP) through the Department of Health to aid home recovery of Canadians from surgery or illness. And the demand for wheelchairs, hospital beds, walkers and IV poles to support people's recovery at home has increased.

Mexico City was at the height of its outbreak, officials say it is facing a rush of cases with an understaffed and underserved hospital system. The authorities started a crash program to scale up. More than 40,000 individuals were hired. Private hospitals agreed to accept thousands of patients for routine operations to relieve the public system along with the military and social security hospitals. Beds were also added in tent hospitals, convention centers and racetracks. Doctors in Cuba have used social media to denounce the lack of drugs, oxygen, and other materials needed to fight a terrible outbreak of COVID19.

Costa Rica has about 30 hospitals and clinics and more than a thousand basic comprehensive care groups at the community level. The country had to set up a specialized center for people living with COVID-19 in just a few weeks, equipped with all the supplies and equipment needed to care for the patients. Patients who tested positive for COVID-19 were ordered to quarantine in their homes for 14 days. Most hospitals in Jamaica exceed the bed capacity designated to manage COVID-19, also the general hospital beds were being used. The increased demand for oxygen also threatens to overpower the supply. The ministry also suspended elective surgeries and start discharging patients who could receive home care. One of the key achievements of the Dominican Republic's reaction was to interlink private, public and military networks, which helped avoid congestion in hospital beds and ICUs across much of the country. Amid the widespread, hospitals confronted serious challenges to get the supplies for their patients and essential protective equipment for their staff.

Africa
The COVID-19 Pandemic has put tremendous pressure on the health system worldwide, which has resulted in many health organizations around the world canceling or suspending elective procedures in their cardiac catheterization laboratories. This delay in voting has undoubtedly led to the delay of patient care. especially those with extreme aortic stenosis, which could put them at higher risk for cardiovascular complications such as heart failure or sudden death.

Hospitals in many areas in Nigeria were under pressure as they care for a growing number of infected people in need of intensive care while facing a shortage of ventilators and personal protective equipment (PPEs). In sub-Saharan Africa are some countries such as Nigeria and Ethiopia had clear inequalities in the delivery of health services, inequality and inequalities in access to basic health care and pre-COVID19 trained health workers. As a result, the lack of healthcare professionals, the lack of guidance on how to continue non-COVID-19 services, and the discouragement of healthcare workers due to a lack of medical equipment and materials have created difficult circumstances in many healthcare facilities.

Fundamental hospitals in Tanzania are crowded with patients showing symptoms of the coronavirus, the intensive care unit is overwhelmed, and funerals have become a daily event. Beds, oxygen and ventilators was in short supply, and the intensive care units were fully occupied. The limited capacity of hospitals across Tanzania may cause life-threatening emergency medical delays. 77% of health facilities in Ghana did not have proper face masks, while half did not have surgical gloves. In some facilities, healthcare workers without adequate personal protective equipment (PPE) or adequate knowledge of IPC regulations were providing care, which resulted in the transmission of COVID-19.

Kenyatta National Hospital, the largest teaching and referral hospital in Kenya, has set up a treatment and isolation unit for the management of positive COVID-19 cases. Almost 1,500 health workers in various health institutions received training in the management of COVID-19 patients. Many countries, including Kenya, adopted other globally trending strategies, such as curfew, lockdowns and increased social distance are being adopted to answer the ideal response to a pandemic. They were warned not to treat patients if their respective hospitals do not provide them with personal protective equipment (PPE). The government ensured that Kenyan health care workers had sufficient masks and PPE, but most hospitals were unable to provide in sufficient quantity. In 2020, some Kenyan nurses refused to treat patients in protest of gear shortages. Nurses in Kakamega County, western Kenya, fled when patients with coronavirus-like symptoms came to the hospital.

Patients in Zimbabwe hospitals and clinics were treated by understudy medical attendants, junior specialists, and other staff who were still in training. This had affected the quality of care and unintentionally increased the morbidity and mortality rates. The hospitals were fully occupied. And Zimbabwe experienced its worst economic crisis in decades, with triple-digit hyperinflation. Effecting the health sectors with shortage of medicines and personal protective equipment. Moreover, doctors and nurses in the country have been on strike-intermittently for more than two years because of insufficient wages and poor working conditions.