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

IntroductionIn 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. AimThe 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 MethodologyA 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. ResultsPHCC 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 recommendationsTo 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.