The COVID-19 Pandemic Impact on Primary Health Care services: An Experience from Qatar

  1. Mariam Abdulmalik
  2. Mohamed Ghaith Al Kuwari
  3. Samya Al Abdulla
  4. Ahmad Haj Bakri
  5. John Gibb
  6. Mujeeb Chettiyam Kandy

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Abstract

Introduction

In March 2020, Qatar started reporting increased numbers of COVID-19 positive cases. The Ministry of Public Health in Qatar has developed an emergency action plan to respond to the outbreak with the Primary Health Care Corporation (PHCC) as a main component of that response.

Aim

The aim of this review is to understand and document the Impact of COVID 19 on PHCC in Qatar in terms of response, modifications of services and introduction of new alternatives

Methodology

A retrospective data analysis was conducted for all the COVID-19 swabbing activities and for all the utilization services volume across the PHCC health centers between January 2018 and May 2020.

Results

PHCC allocated testing sites for COVID-19 resulted in conducting 54824 swabs with 11455 positive cases and positivity rate of 20.8% between 14th of March and 15th of June 2020. The overall PHCC services utilization declined with overall reduction of 50% in April 2020. Alternative virtual and remote services were provided, telemedicine was introduced, and it made up 50% of the consultation volumes for April 2020. Home refill delivery medications managed to provide a total of 20920 delivered prescriptions by end of May 2020.

Conclusion and recommendations

To decrease the risk of infection to the patients and health care workers, PHCC in Qatar cancelled the appointments for some high-risk population. However, PHCC introduced virtual remote services that managed to make up for the in-person utilization volume and reflected acceptance in patients’ behaviours. PHCC continued in detecting positive COVID-19 cases among its targeted communities.

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  1. ScreenIT

    SciScore for 10.1101/2020.07.22.20160333: (What is this?)

    Please note, not all rigor criteria are appropriate for all manuscripts.

    Table 1: Rigor

    Institutional Review Board Statementnot detected.
    Randomizationnot detected.
    Blindingnot detected.
    Power Analysisnot detected.
    Sex as a biological variablenot detected.

    Table 2: Resources

    No key resources detected.

    Results from OddPub: We did not detect open data. We also did not detect open code. Researchers are encouraged to share open data when possible (see Nature blog).

    Results from LimitationRecognizer: An explicit section about the limitations of the techniques employed in this study was not found. We encourage authors to address study limitations.

    Results from TrialIdentifier: No clinical trial numbers were referenced.

    Results from Barzooka: We did not find any issues relating to the usage of bar graphs.

    Results from JetFighter: We did not find any issues relating to colormaps.

    Results from rtransparent:
    • Thank you for including a conflict of interest statement. Authors are encouraged to include this statement when submitting to a journal.
    • Thank you for including a funding statement. Authors are encouraged to include this statement when submitting to a journal.
    • Thank you for including a protocol registration statement.

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  2. Version published to 10.1101/2020.07.22.20160333v1 on medRxiv