3 Challenges The Healthcare Industry Faced During The COVID-19 Pandemic

Experts agree that the Coronavirus disease-2019 (COVID-19) pandemic has taken the whole world by surprise. And while it’s true that countries are now starting to bounce back and reclaim the losses they’ve incurred during the height of the global health crisis, many aren’t still able to fully grasp the debilitating long-term ill impacts of the whole ordeal.

Being a health crisis, perhaps the most impaired sector worldwide is the healthcare industry. When the infection erupted and made rounds in almost every country in the globe, healthcare providers and professionals were dragged by the neck in helping curb the spread of the illness. 

Even with the situation being slightly better and becoming more manageable in certain aspects of medical care, medical frontliners are still yet to fully recover. The following are three challenges the healthcare industry faced and continue to deal with in line with the COVID-19 public health crisis:

Being a pandemic, one of the major challenges faced by the healthcare institutions is the glaring lack of resources in managing COVID 19, such as personal protective equipment or PPEs, medicines, hospital beds, oxygen tanks, and the list goes on. This halted the immediate response of hospital frontliners to the rapidly increasing number of cases. 

What happened was, especially during the first few months of the pandemic, there was an insufficient supply of healthcare equipment and items due to the lockdown protocols put in place. The same could be said true as well with internationally exported and imported goods, especially with the border restrictions placed on different countries.

This isolated the supply chain and forced it to rely on local suppliers, whose goods were already running out as a response to the influx of orders from health institutions. And even with the border restrictions slightly relieved, the supply chain had already been impaired and supplies still remain scarce.

Fortunately, the supply chain is now in the process of being revolutionized with the help of technology and the lessons that suppliers learned during the peak of the pandemic. Hospital institutions are also now encouraged to outsource equipment and medicines that can help them.

Since COVID-19 is highly infectious, people who are suspected and have undergone testing need to be quarantined for a set number of days. Putting COVID-19 patients under quarantine has already challenged the available spaces and resources in most healthcare facilities, but COVID-19 patients aren’t the only ones admitted to hospitals. 

It created a scenario where healthcare workers needed to maximize their available resources for every patient in the hospital. This put a strain, not only on supplies, but also the time needed to tend for each patient. It’s believed that as the workforce started to spread too thin as the number of patients surged, quality of care decreased and workload increased.

This resulted in healthcare workers having to work beyond their contract hours, or worse, becoming sick themselves. The lack of manpower further impaired the response capacity of health facilities, thereby critical care services such as testing and tending on patients have been put on momentary delays. 

The COVID-19 pandemic has put fear into almost everyone because of how infectious and deadly it is. And ironic as it may sound, healthcare workers are one of the top sources of the masses’ trepidation.

This is because healthcare providers have firsthand experience with the virus. It cultivated a mindset that being near them is dangerous. And as the stigma becomes more widely pronounced, healthcare workers are forced to bury it down and continue to help people.

In addition, the lack of equal recognition of healthcare workers has also proven to affect their mental health negatively. Of the most common, nurses have always been eclipsed by doctors, despite working in the same healthcare industry. And while it’s easy to say that ‘recognition’ isn’t important, for people who are risking their lives to help others, a simple ‘thank you’ helps them a great deal. 

Also, some healthcare workers are trapped in a moral dilemma that somehow coaxes them to stay in the industry. Since the COVID-19 pandemic is a global health crisis, their job isn’t just a profession but a service to humanity itself as well. And as ennobling as it sounds, some healthcare workers aren’t properly compensated, despite working beyond their contract hours. 

All of these can lead to serious mental issues that can largely and negatively affect healthcare services. And since the work of healthcare professionals is mentally and physically taxing, ensuring they’re at their peak condition and have a great outlook can help everyone in the long run.

The healthcare industry acts as the bastion of humanity against the COVID-19 pandemic. Given the threat of this health crisis, the challenges that the healthcare industry faces are also the problems and issues that everyone collectively faces. Henceforth, collective action is necessary for all of society to move past COVID-19.