New guidance from the World Health Organization (WHO) will help countries keep essential health services running whilst taking measures to keep people safe in the COVID-19 pandemic. Most health systems are facing challenges of increased demand for care of people with COVID-19, compounded by fear, misinformation and limitations on movement that disrupt the delivery of health care for all conditions. Countries must find ways to keep people safe and ensure the delivery of services such as emergency care for conditions like heart attacks and injury; immunization to prevent outbreaks; treatment for infectious diseases like HIV, malaria and tuberculosis; and screening and treatment for noncommunicable diseases like cancer and diabetes.
Maintaining essential health services: operational guidance for the COVID-19 context recommends practical actions that countries can take at national, sub regional and local levels to reorganize and safely maintain access to high-quality, essential health services. It also outlines sample indicators for monitoring the maintenance of essential health services and describes considerations about when to stop and restart services as COVID-19 transmission waxes and wanes.
The guide outlines a set of basic principles and makes some practical recommendations for countries. These include:
The guidance provides specific advice on ways to meet some common health needs. Examples include mechanisms to decrease the volume of people visiting health centres through bulk prescriptions of medications and nutritional supplements and delivering at home for from drop-off points.
Other approaches include monitoring and outreach to people with existing conditions to ensure that they seek care that cannot be safely delayed, such as emergency care for heart attacks, sepsis or complications of pregnancy; auxiliary services, such as basic diagnostic imaging, laboratory and blood bank services.
The guidance outlines specific recommendations on adapting the ways vaccines are administered to reduce the risk of COVID-19 transmission while preventing outbreaks of other deadly diseases.
It also highlights ways to protect people who are particularly vulnerable to the direct and indirect consequences of the pandemic. These include interventions to protect older people from infection and mitigate the effects of social isolation; or alternatives to school-based delivery of services, such as nutritional supplementation, and activities to protect children from violence and keep them healthy at home when schools are closed. It also offers guidance on how mental health services be enhanced and strengthened in the pandemic context.
This new guidance will help decision-makers and managers at the national and subnational levels to ensure the continuity of essential health services in the context of COVID-19.
This is an unprecedented coordinated effort within WHO across four divisions, 14 departments, and dozens of program units at WHO headquarters, all liaising with regional counterparts across the globe.
Source: WHO