Facing the Pandemic: The Italian Experience From Health Management Experts’ Perspective

Abstract

Globalization has boosted the development of new pathogens as well as their capacity to cross national borders and threaten citizens’ health. It should therefore have been no surprise that the infection caused by COVID-19 spread so quickly from the metropolitan city of Wuhan, China, to the whole world. Today, the COVID-19 pandemic represents the biggest health crisis for many countries since the postwar period. The aggressiveness of the virus quickly led many countries to bring in strict containment measures to limit the spread of the disease and particularly to reduce pressure on hospitals. Pandemics affect the health care community in different ways, but all involve a bigger flow of patients into the system, compromising the proper functioning of hospitals. Italy was the first Western country to be heavily affected by the virus. This article describes how Italian health care organizations are facing the COVID-19 pandemic. A survey administered to health management experts highlights the main problems and possible ways for health care organizations to cope with the health crisis more effectively. Results highlight that the COVID-19 pandemic had a dramatic impact on health care organizations, forcing all hospitals to modify structures and processes to guarantee an efficacious response to new patient care needs. The lack of specialized resources, appropriate coordination tools, and clear plans for emergency management were the main problems faced by hospitals. Italy’s experience could be useful to countries facing the crisis today, or those which will face it in the near future.

Flexibility and Bed Margins of the Community of Madrid’s Hospitals during the First Wave of the SARS-CoV-2 Pandemic

“…This paper focuses on modeling the hospital capacities in terms of ICU and non-ICU beds during the pandemic while distinguishing between patients with and without COVID-19, since most publications focus on bed management in other contexts [ 28 , 29 , 30 , 31 , 32 , 33 ] (except for Condes and Arribas [ 34 ] and Fanelli et al [ 35 ]). We have not found a work in the literature that gives information on this topic with the details and large number of hospital and inpatients that this article uses, highlighting the fact that the hospitals involved in this study were in the epicenter of the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic at the European level.…”

Disruptive crisis management: lessons from managing a hospital during the COVID-19 pandemic

“…The Gemelli was chosen for the case study as it is a center of national excellence in Italy in terms of health research and quality of care, and because it is one of the reference hospitals for the national management of COVID-19 patients. Although many hospitals were in serious difficulty managing the crisis (Fanelli et al, 2020), the Gemelli put in place many strategic measures. These in fact provided longer term responses to various problems raised by the crisis, including safe pathways for non-COVID-19 patients, management of COVID-19 patient flows, and monitoring of infection rates, etc.…”

Public-private partnership in health care organizations. How to cope with complexity issues: a comparative case-study between Italy and the US

“…Yet, in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, the I-NHS had to make cuts to public health expenditure across each subsequent government (Ferrario and Zanardi, 2011; Neri, 2019) and raised concerns over the quality of care provided (Falco, 2019). Furthermore, the COVID-19 – currently ongoing – pandemics revealed the weaknesses of the system, suggesting potential issues to be faced (Fanelli et al , 2020).…”