Ensuring safety for Aster Sanad heroes during COVID-19 (25 September 2020)

Summary

The COVID 19 pandemic has been testing the resilience of healthcare workers around the globe. With increased patient loads, the constant threat of getting infected, and ordeal of treating the critically ill, there have been increased burnouts and mental health issues. The safety of Healthcare workers is, therefore, a real concern that needs to be addressed carefully and decisively.

Neesha Nair and Ihab Alawour from the Aster Sanad Hospital reflect on how lessons from the MERS-COV epidemics in Saudi Arabia helped them plan for the emerging coronavirus crisis. They use the Systems Engineering Initiative for Patient Safety (SEIPS) framework which places healthcare workers at the centre of the work system. All other system components like healthcare work tasks, technologies and tools, environmental factors, and organisational conditions, serve to enable the healthcare worker to perform their role and determine the quality of the outcomes, may it be job effectiveness or occupational health and safety.