COVID-19 Pandemic: A challenge to Health Care Workers; A Systemic Review
Abstract
Background: Emergence of COVID-19 pandemic has brought humankind to knees and has led to unprecedented challenge for health care system worldwide. Growing pandemic has caused detrimental affect over physical, psychological, social, spiritual and occupational health of frontline warriors. We aimed to review various challenges faced by health care workers so that major issues can be dealt with. Methods: A systemic review was conducted using vide range of literature i.e. published reports of ministry of health and family welfare, Government of India and published original research papers from reputed indexed journals, e-journals and electronic data base like Medline, Embase, Pubmed, CINAHL, Scopus, CISTI etc using key search terms. Findings: Total of 21 studies were reviewed which included issues related to HCWs worldwide. To combat with COVID-19 pandemic, frontline warriors came across multiple stressors like shortage of protective medical supplies, poor quality PPE, hazardous effect over physical, mental, social and occupational health, mortality and morbidity rate of HCWs due to SARS-CoV-2 and magnitude of COVID-19 spread. Conclusion: COVID-19 pandemic burdened health sector to which mounting an effective response against this devastation was a big challenge. Significant inefficiency, dysfunction and acute shortcomings of healthcare delivery systems didn’t match up with growing needs of HCWs. Understanding depth of this distressful situation and fragility and frailty of human race was need of hour. Amidst this pandemic, amendments in policies and protocols is taken into consideration and more emphasis on safety measures like wearing masks, PPE as a universal precaution was given.
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