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Bracing healthcare facilities for impact of pandemics

A Director at Anglia Ruskin University argues that while NHS personnel have undertaken tremendous work during the coronavirus outbreak, a re-think is needed on making healthcare facilities more resilient to events such as pandemics.

Nebil Achour, Director for the MSc Healthcare Management programme at Anglia Ruskin University, argues that while frontline NHS clinical staff and their estates and facilities colleagues have undertaken tremendous work as the pressure on healthcare facilities has ramped up during the UK coronavirus outbreak, a re-think is needed on making hospitals and other healthcare facilities more resilient and able to ‘cope’ in the face of events such as pandemics, where existing guidance and contingency plans may no longer be up to date or relevant enough to today’s healthcare, or to the mass casualties that such events can cause.

The ongoing COVID-19 outbreak has demonstrated its ability to disrupt healthcare services globally, and afforded some sense of scale as to what a severe mass casualty event looks like. The pandemic started in China in December 2019; however, it did not cause any significant concerns for the Chinese authorities until January this year, when the number of infected people started increasing exponentially, forcing such authorities to look to immediate solutions. The WHO declared COVID-19 as a pandemic at a later date, when there was sufficient evidence that it was beginning to rapidly spread across the world. At the time of writing this article, over 8.7 million people have become infected, hundreds of thousands are receiving care , and around 462,000 people globally have lost their lives as a result of contracting the virus.

Risk is often modelled as a combination of hazard, vulnerability, and exposure, which tend to affect the risk as they increase or decrease (Fig. 1). In the case of COVID-19, ‘hazard’ (i.e. the coronavirus), and vulnerability (i.e. lack of health immunity), are perhaps difficult to control at this stage, for a substantial number of reasons, meaning that exposure to the virus (i.e. the number of individuals exposed) is the only one of the three aforementioned factors that nations and societies worldwide can influence; this explains the lockdown policies implemented in recent weeks in many countries, including the UK. Via such a lockdown, the hope is that the numbers of casualties, and in turn the resulting pressures and demand on healthcare systems not designed to cater for such a sudden influx of patients, can be reduced.

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Upcoming Events

The Fire Safety Event 2024

National Exhibition Centre (NEC), Birmingham
30th April - 2 May 2024

Wales regional conference, exhibition and awards dinner 2024

International Conference Centre (ICC) Newport
28th - 29th May 2024

NAHFO National Conference 2024

Crowne Plaza Newcastle Upon Tyne
3rd - 5th June 2024

Design in Mental Health 2024

Manchester Central
4th - 5th June 2024

InstallerSHOW 2024

National Exhibition Centre (NEC), Birmingham
25th - 27th June

Healthcare Estates 2024

Manchester Central
8th-9th October 2024

Access the latest issue of Health Estate Journal on your mobile device together with an archive of back issues.

Download the FREE Health Estate Journal app from your device's App store

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