Knowledge About COVID-19 and Perception of Health Safety Among Mexican Dental Students

This study aimed: 1) to investigate sources of information used by students to learn about COVID-19, 2) to investigate levels of knowledge about COVID-19 and about conditions for the treatment of patients during the COVID-19 lockdown, and 3) to evaluate students' perceptions of safety regarding their return to in-person activities at the School of Dentistry. Dental students answered a questionnaire (29 items;n=371) that explored the aims of the study, based on a Likert scale (Cronbach's alpha, 0.778). Data were tested with the Mann-Whitney U test and Kendall's Tau-c. Dental students received information about COVID-19 from the Mexican Health Ministry as their first source (45.28%). Students had good knowledge about the main characteristics of COVID-19, and 59.3% of students had excellent knowledge about the factors relevant to dental treatment of patients. Half of the students said they felt safe regarding a possible return to in-person activities at the dental school, while the other half did not. Statistically significant differences were noted between the students' scholar year and their level of knowledge (P<0.001) and between their perception of safety (very unsafe, unsafe, safe, and very safe) and scholar year (P=0.000). Dental students had good knowledge about COVID-19 and about the dental care for patients during the lockdown. Half of the dental students felt unsafe about a possible return to in-person school activities. © 2023, Universidad de Costa Rica. All rights reserved.

Governing health workforce responses during COVID-19. (Special Issue: COVID-19 health system governance.)

Countries in Europe have rapidly scaled-up, redeployed, repurposed, retrained and retained their workforce during COVID-19 to create surge capacity, protect the health and well-being of the workforce, and ensure effective implementation of vaccination programmes. Doing so has had enormous governance implications, including the need for intra-governmental and cross-organisational governance actions, increased transparency for planning, and delegated leadership to health employers and health workers. It is important that stakeholders continue to learn and share their experiences on the effectiveness of different workforce governance responses to allow the health workforce to recover, rebuild and repurpose.

Investing in the health workforce, protecting mental health: policy and action taken by WHO : Tomas Zapata

Background The COVID-19 pandemic and the current war in Ukraine have presented opportunities to increase national leadership on mental health, including support health and care workers. Member States across the region have worked closely with the WHO to strengthen their policy levers to support the mental health and occupational safety policies for the workforce at various levels including government, organization and local service levels. To complement these policies, the WHO will launch the WHO Global Health and Care Compact at the Seventy-fifth World Health Assembly in May 2022. Methods The WHO has convened Member States to discuss the policy levers that can support the mental health of health and care workers. These include online multistakeholder webinar series, national policy dialogs, ministerial discussions during the Regional Committee, preparatory consultations for the World Health Assembly to discuss priority areas and policy. More recently with the crisis in Ukraine, the WHO has been working closely with the UN Interagency Steering Committee (IASC) Reference Group on Mental Health and Psychosocial Support in Emergency Settings rolling out services for refugees, including health workers in these settings. Results A number of important policy recommendations are emerging from this work: (1) strengthening national and political leadership;(2) adopting stepped approaches;(3) facilitating collaboration across professions, sectors and levels of syste for more effective responses;(4) strengthening capacity and expertise;(5) monitoring effectiveness for continuous improvement;(6) ensuring acceptability and accessibility. Conclusions Promoting health and well-being and mental health support to the health and care workforce has become a key priority for health systems to enable sustainable national health workforces. WHO will prioritize country support on this area and the development of regional guidance.

Health workforce governance during the COVID-19 pandemic: learning lessons from Europe : Gemma Williams

Background This study considers some of the effective governance tools that have been utilised to mobilise, redeploy and repurpose the health workforce during the COVID-19 pandemic to create surge capacity, protect workforce health and wellbeing and ensure effective implementation of vaccination programmes. Methods Data were systematically extracted from the Observatory/WHO Europe/European Commission Health System and Response Monitor, covering the period from March 2020 to May 2021 with a focus on four dimensions of health workforce governance: national/regional government policies;legislation;regulation;the role and remit of employers and management. Results A wide-range of governance actions across all levels were required to ensure the health workforce could provide effective pandemic responses. Creating surge capacity, for example, often required adoption of emergency legislation to facilitate exceptional hiring procedures and the changing of (re-)registration requirements, as well as additional training and development of new competencies among other actions. Putting in place physical and mental health support meanwhile required defining infection control policies, monitoring PPE supply and distribution, ensuring access to free mental health support, and implementation of breaks. Some countries also allowed “new” types of workers to vaccinate;online or in person training;adjustments to payment mechanisms;and creating new supervision requirements. Conclusions Pandemic responses have broken up sclerotic governance structures which have hampered past health workforce development and reform, new training programmes have been rapidly developed, leadership roles have been delegated to a wider-range of health professionals than before and monitoring systems that provide more rapid data on staffing levels have been put into place. Learning from and evaluating these changes will be important to help inform future pandemic responses.

Health services during Covid-19: What do we know of the degree of service disruption and size of the backlogs? : Florian Tille

Since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, there have been concerns that shifting health system capacities towards acute COVID-19 cases can affect the provision of non-COVID-19 essential health services, causing severe disruptions and lack of care. Examples of this have been seen during other epidemic outbreaks, such as the 2014-2016 Ebola outbreak in West Africa. To capture the degree of service disruption across the European and Central Asian region, we analysed data from the World Health Organization's Pulse Survey on the Continuity of Essential Health Services, conducted in three rounds in 2020 and 2021. The key findings include: – Health service provision has been heavily disrupted in virtually all countries. 91% of countries reported service disruptions in late 2021, indicating that health services continue to be disrupted at large scale. – Service discontinuation has been substantial across all levels of care and in most service areas, often resulting in delays and cancellations of elective and emergency procedures, routine visits, prescription renewals, and referrals to specialty care. This has led to growing backlogs and record waiting times for services. – Countries have been affected to varying degrees and report different levels of service disruption, size of the backlog, recovery of services aiming for pre-pandemic levels, and interventions to manage waiting lists. The findings indicate that even as health systems are better learning to care for acute COVID-19 patients, the pandemic's impact on essential health services is massive and likely to affect the care for people's health and well-being post the acute phase of the public health emergency. Measuring the size of backlogs and implementing innovative care solutions are urgent and paramount.