COVID-19 AS A STRESS TEST OF HEALTHCARE ESTABLISHMENTS EFFECTIVENESS AND RELIABILITY MEASURED NATIONALLY AND GLOBALLY

Abstract

The aim: The authors aimed to estimate the healthcare environment risks and safety problems of the medical staff and patients, methods of neutralizing the negative public health effects and to suggest the new approaches to improved effectiveness and reliability of the healthcare establishments functioning under the emergencies. Materials and methods: The study includes data of questioning of 163 healthcare workers of certain institutions in Ukraine using the questionnaire of the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality ( the USA) on adherence to the patients’ safety culture. In this study only the data on the patients’ safety culture “response to mistakes” are represented. The more positive answers the respondents gave, the less they are aware that their mistakes and reports do not influence them negatively. Results: Hospital environment reprsents a complex multi-component system, in which specific medical and social tasks are executed, with their fulfillment accompanied with hazardous and unsafe biological, psycho-physiological, chemical, physical and social effects on the staff, patients and the environment. The joined effect of the hospital environment negative factors on the staff is stipulated for the stress and functional tiredness accumulation; it leads to increase in medical mistakes occurrence, which, in its turn, increases probability of occupational catching COVID-19, thus, raising the hospital environment risks under the COVID-19 circumstances both for the medical staff and the patients. Conclusions: The COVID-19 pandemics turned to be a helpful factor to define critical issues in the hospital environment safety, proving the necessity of further studies, aimed at transforming the safe hospital environment notion from its theoretical meaning into the working paradigm, minimizing practical risk in hospital establishments.