An Interdisciplinary Approach to the Management of Critically Ill Patients During Covid-19 Pandemic; An Experience of a University Hospital in England

Abstract

COVID-19 pandemic presents significant challenges in delivering safe and efficient patient care, especially during the surges. In all health care systems, provision of available critical care facilities is a scarce resource, even in normal times. Problematic is not just the limitation of physical spaces in intensive care units, but also the availability of trained personnel. The critical care model, developed in Queen Elizabeth Hospital Birmingham to cope with the surge of COVID-19 patients, is based on early implementation of an interdisciplinary approach and extensive cooperation between the branches of practice, allowing to address both challenges. The main pillars are early upskilling of non-critical care staff, creation of safe, streamlined clinical pathways, adjustment of the physical layout of critical care units and comprehensive cross-town cooperation allowing to accommodate an increased number of patients, requiring intensive care. The model was well tested in clinical practice, enabling the hospital to increase the critical care footprint by more than 200% during the pandemic’s surge between March and May 2020.

Effect of COVID-19 Pandemic on Teachers’ Health: Lessons for Improving Distance Education

“…For the protection of public health, it was necessary to move to distance education, which was introduced in most general secondary education institutions, but such a transition had a great impact on the deterioration of the health of teachers and students (Torliński et al, 2020). Discussions on how to organize distance work, how to restructure the educational process -seems comprehensive.…”

Postgraduate education and specialty training in anaesthesia and intensive care medicine during the COVID-19 pandemic: experience from a large teaching hospital in the United Kingdom

“…To navigate this new format, we met with our trainee candidates to discuss how their exam preparation was going and to allow us to understand what assistance they required from us as trainers. In the immediate run-up to the examination, we conducted several mock examinations online preparing our candidates for new, potentially more stressful conditions of examinations in the virtual world [ 8 ].…”