Expectations from 2022

The Covid-19 pandemic has put some health systems under immense pressure and stretched others beyond their capacity. As such, responding to this public health emergency and successfully minimizing its impact requires every health resource to be leveraged. Failure to protect healthcare in this rapidly changing context exposes health systems to critical gaps in services when they are most needed, and can have a long-lasting impact on the health and wellbeing of populations.

Since the beginning of the outbreak, healthcare providers have been shown more support, solidarity, and gratitude than they ever have. Yet, attacks on healthcare have continuously been reported and now include incidents linked to the Covid-19 pandemic across the world. This unprecedented public health emergency has demonstrated that health facilities, medical transport, patients, as well as healthcare workers and their families can – and do – become targets everywhere. This alarming trend reinforces the need for improved measures to protect healthcare from acts of violence. During the Covid-19 pandemic, more than ever, protecting the health and lives of healthcare providers on the frontline is critical to enabling a better global response.

Doctors’ associations across the world have also initiated talks with authorities to make their work environment safe from infections and to better protect healthcare providers outside the hospital. Through its Healthcare in Danger initiative, the International Committee of the Red Cross published a checklist for a safer Covid-19 response addressed to managers of health-care services, individual practitioners, and health policymakers. WHO and partners are also conducting communication and outreach campaigns at the country-level to support governments in addressing attacks on healthcare.

The Covid-19 pandemic has changed how health professionals work, how we behave and interact within our teams and organizations, our understandings of personal health and risk, inequalities between doctors with different risk factors, and wellbeing and mental health. Globally, more than 300,000 healthcare workers have been infected with Covid-19 in 79 countries. Over 7000 have died, and many more have suffered as a result of stress, burnout, and moral injury.

There is an urgent need for a system-level approach to address the issues that Covid-19 has created to better protect and safeguard our medical workforce for the future. Such approaches need to focus on organizational culture and staff wellbeing as integral to professionalism and central to patient care. All physicians’ wellbeing must be recognized as a quality indicator for all health systems. Improving the working lives of clinicians can optimize the performance of health systems, improve patient experience, drive population health, and reduce costs.

The professions must adapt to the changing needs of modern clinical practice and shape how we balance the many competing demands on us. Health professionals must build on the changes that are good for patient care and resist those that are not. Covid-19 has shown that we must move away from a model of medical professionalism that can lead to moral injury and towards one that provides proactive support for professionals in a systematic way and is focused on supporting moral repair. With the second and subsequent waves of Covid-19 now well established in many countries, we need to ensure that we as a profession support our doctors and promote ways of working that incorporate the doctor, the patient, teams, health-care organizations, workplace environment, and health systems. Over time, this wider system approach will lead to greater cohesiveness within healthcare and support individual professionals in a safer, more sustainable way.

The government should look at according priority status to the healthcare segment while increasing the public expenditure on the sector to at least 3 percent of the GDP in the upcoming Union Budget. As per the leading healthcare providers in the country in the private sector, the government should also consider the continuation of tax incentives, up gradation of medical facilities in smaller towns, and skilling of the workforce in the budget. A medical innovation fund should be set up to provide capital to companies promoting digital healthcare infrastructure.