FEATURE ARTICLES
HOW FLEXIBLE SOLUTIONS CAN IMPROVE THE RESILIENCE OF HEALTHCARE DELIVERY As the coronavirus has demanded responses from health systems across the globe, we have seen a number of temporary hospitals housed in converted conference or sports centres take shape, including in Italy, Spain, Brazil, UK and the US. Closer to home, a temporary hospital was built in Canberra, with sites in major capital cities around the country considered in case a need for additional capacity emerged.
R
ecent developments have demonstrated how quickly a temporary solution can be made operational in an emergency situation. The NHS Nightingale in London was completed in only nine days, using the vast space that already existed within the Excel Centre, and an exhibition centre in Milan was converted into Italy’s largest intensive care facility for coronavirus patients in just ten days. Of course, the current situation with COVID-19 is exceptional. It is severely testing the resilience of healthcare systems around the globe, and major action is needed to ensure lives are saved. However, we are already in the midst of a crisis, and the rapid deployment of these facilities has depended on direct support from Governments and the military, along with access to almost unlimited resources.
In Australia, a third of all intensive care capacity is in the private hospital sector, and we’ve seen public sector healthcare capacity also boosted by additional bed spaces requisitioned from the private sector. At the end of March, the Government entered into an agreement that would ensure over 30,000 private sector hospital beds and over 100,000 staff would be made available to strengthen the Australian COVID-19 response, and preserve the sector’s capacity to resume hospital services after the epidemic. However, while the large scale, temporary hospitals are getting most of the headlines at the moment, a huge amount of work is also going on behind the scenes at hospitals across the country to improve resilience on a local level. These have been ordered to free up significant capacity by discharging as many non-critical patients
37
