Ideas for post-quarantine health care services in Southern Philippines Medical Center

ABSTRACT

@#The response of Southern Philippines Medical Center (SPMC), the largest tertiary government hospital in Davao Region, to the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic is detailed in the brief report of Astudillo.1 The guiding principles for implementing the structural and operational modifications made by SPMC in its health care services during quarantine were to focus on the diagnostic and therapeutic management of patients with probable or confirmed COVID-19 and to limit the spread of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19. As can be gleaned from the hospital's census before and during quarantine, extreme focus on COVID-19 health care, when sustained for a long time, can potentially compromise other essential, but non-COVID-19, health care services. On the other hand, restoring full-scale health care services to pre-COVID-19 amplitude can potentially increase the spread of the virus. Restoring hospital health care delivery to a more balanced state—comprehensive in scope, yet fully responsive to the epidemiological status of COVID-19—requires several rigorous cycles of planning, execution, and revision. Fortunately, the quarantine period has given SPMC—as a health care provider—an opportunity to maximize the efficiency of the delivery and utilization of health care services amid the extreme focus on infection control and management. It also compelled the institution to more frequently carry out certain procedures that were not often practiced before—teleconferencing, teleconsultations, operating on skeleton workforce, allowing work from home schemes, etc. As SPMC prepares to gradually reinstate health care services that were scaled down or put on hold during the quarantine period, some practices that need to be developed or sustained in the presence of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic are worth pointing out for consideration. Like SPMC, hospitals that provide diagnostic and therapeutic managements of patients with COVID-19 are considered COVID-19 hotspots—where concentrations of patients with the disease are very high, and where most hospital staff who eventually get infected with SARS-CoV-2 have been initially exposed to the virus. Therefore, the goal of health care from this point on is to keep people away from hospitals that manage patients with COVID-19, as much as possible. Any task, transaction, operation, or essential person-to-person interaction that is not dependent on hospital facilities and equipment should be done outside the hospital.