ABSTRACT
[...]work has been done to support implementation of a package of emergency care tools including: the Integrated Interagency Triage Tool (prehospital, routine and mass casualty);Emergency Medical and Trauma Care Checklists;the Basic Emergency Care - an open-access training course for frontline health-care providers who manage acute illness and injury with limited resources;and the International Registry of Trauma and Emergency care to help gather essential data about the performance of emergency care systems (6,7). Despite countries' efforts to control patient flow by directing suspected COVID-19 patients to dedicated facilities, many "self-present" to facilities of their choosing. [...]patients presenting for unrelated emergencies (e.g., trauma) may also be co-infected with COVID-19 - whether or not they are symptomatic. Additionally, many EMR countries lack legislation guaranteeing access to emergency care for all (a key WHO Health System Building Block under governance), which limits access to marginal communities (10). Since the Region is host to the largest number of displaced persons in the world, region-specific guidance has been developed to guide health system response to COVID-19 in the context of displacement (22). [...]there is a paucity of high-quality published data on emergency care systems in the Region and an urgent need for operational research to understand the emergency care needs and emergency care systems performance in EMR countries.
ABSTRACT
The COVID-19 pandemic began as a cluster of reported cases of acute respiratory illness in China on 31 December 2019 and went on to spread with exponential growth across the globe. By the time it was characterized as a global pandemic on 11 March 2020, 17 of 22 countries in the Eastern Mediterranean Region (EMR) had reports of infected persons. EMR countries are particularly susceptible to such outbreaks due to the presence of globally interconnected markets; complex emergencies in more than half of the countries; religious mass gatherings that draw tens of millions of pilgrims annually; and variation in emergency care systems capacity and health systems performance within and between countries.