A new HIFA thematic discussion: Maintaining essential health services during the pandemic: What have we learned? Starts 15 November 2021

9 November, 2021

Dear HIFA-Zambia colleagues

We can now look back on 12-18 months of experience of the COVID-19 pandemic. Some countries have now entered a recovery phase with relatively few new cases and deaths (at least for now). Other countries continue to be facing heavy caseloads. Almost every country has been affected and we have seen that essential health services - reproductive health, child health, mental health, non-communicable disease, surgery - have been severely disrupted in many ways. Even for those countries that are in a recovery phase, there are major challenges in terms of late presentation of disease and delayed access to surgery.

I would like to invite you to shsre your experiences of how the pandemic has affected the delivery of essential health services in Zambia.

What have we learned? How can we better maintain newborn health services during a pandemic? What action(s) did your government take that facilitated (or hindered) the delivery of services? How can we build resilience moving forwards?

1. Looking back over the past 18 months, in what ways has COVID-19 affected your work? What impact has COVID-19 had on your organisation or your health facility? How have things changed over time and where are you now?

2. How have you responded to these challenges? What worked well and not so well?

3. A health service is only as good as the people who work within it. Health workers have been under extraordinary pressures for several months on end. What have we learned and how can we better support health workers going forward?

4. We have noted there is not only disruption to the delivery of services, but also in demand for services, associated with exaggerated fears of contagion from health facilities. How have attitudes changed in your experience/country?

Highlights of earlier HIFA discussions are available as two Action Briefs on the WHO website:

1. HIFA: A Thematic Discussion on Maintaining Essential Health Services

https://hlh.who.int/ab-detail/findings-from-a-hifa-thematic-discussion

2. How has COVID-19 affected delivery of EHS? HIFA 2nd Discussion

https://hlh.who.int/ab-detail/how-has-covid-19-affected-delivery-of-ehs-...

Best wishes, Neil

HIFA profile: Neil Pakenham-Walsh is coordinator of the HIFA global health movement (Healthcare Information For All - www.hifa.org ), a global community with more than 20,000 members in 180 countries, interacting on six global forums in four languages in collaboration with WHO. HIFA brings stakeholders together to accelerate progress towards universal access to reliable healthcare information.

Twitter: @hifa_org neil@hifa.org