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Healthy Planet. Healthy People.

Healthcare / Infection control

European Healthcare Design 2021

EHD 2021: Keynote plenary: the Covid-19 Global Summit

By SALUS User Experience Team 28 Sep 2021 0

This session introduced the opening keynote plenary of the COVID-19 Global Summit, a ‘conference within a conference’.



Abstract

Addressing the Congress on the NHS’ experience of the pandemic, Dr Layla McCay, director of policy at NHS Confederation, explained that many of the challenges seen at the beginning of the first wave had now been addressed.

According to Dr McCay, the four main challenges, as of June 2021, were:

  • how to manage the ongoing variants and surges of Covid-19;
  • how to recover health services at the same time as enabling staff to recover and delivering the biggest ever vaccination programme while still treating people with Covid-19;
  • how to manage the long-term health impacts; and
  • how to sustain the innovation that occurred during the pandemic and take it forward to strengthen the healthcare system.

Moving from the UK to the Singaporean experience, Prof Leo Yee Sin, executive director of the National Centre for Infectious Diseases (NCID), offered delegates her perspective on how the organisation is helping direct the city state’s pandemic response.

The NCID, planning for which began following the 2003 SARS outbreak, was designed to strengthen Singapore’s capacity and capability in infectious diseases and outbreak-related prevention, surveillance, clinical management, outbreak readiness and response.

Integrating clinical management, public health, research, training/education, and community outreach, the 330-bed purpose-built facility officially opened in September 2019 (although it had been operating for several months prior to this date) and features a full suite of medical facilities, including 17 wards (124 negative pressure rooms, 100 isolation rooms, and 64 cohort beds); two intensive care units comprising 38 beds; four high-level isolation units; two operating theatres; biosafety labs; a satellite diagnostic lab; a research lab; a screening centre, among other areas.

This keynote session was kindly supported by AECOM.