How did Coronavirus affect the Turkish healthcare system?
While coronavirus had stopped most industries temporarily with its expectancy, the health sector has been obligated to be up and running to assist as many people as possible throughout the pandemic. With everyone’s trust on the health workers’ shoulders, the battle to fight off coronavirus has been going on approximately since the end of 2019. While there have been certain restrictions by countries, waves of surges still occurred. Though it was hard for everyone experiencing it by abiding by curfews or staying at home quarantined, the healthcare workers had it worse having to deal with the problem in the field. While people were cooped up at home, watching the number of cases rise on the TV news, healthcare workers had to deal with cases in the hospitals one by one.
While the impact of coronavirus on work lives of everyone, on students or etc. is mostly discussed, people tend to forget that healthcare system in indeed composed of various people, or workers, who are the ones that help us keep a semblance of our old lives by working so hard and are struggling as much as everyone, if not more. Therefore, in Turkey, there were national hotlines established to provide psychological assistance for healthcare workers. This hotline was to cover many difficulties that healthcare workers, the most important cogs in the healthcare system, may face. The difficulties they face can mostly arise from the exhaustion and at the beginning of the pandemic, because of the lack of assistance they can supply to coronavirus cases without a certain remedy before the vaccine. As the number of cases rose and there was no time to prepare and the lack of decisive policies on the issue. The healthcare workers did not have the time to prepare. These combined with the doubt that they could be a transmitter of the virus and the high tempo of their work exacerbated the situation for them.
The workload on healthcare workers still linger with the several coronavirus variants that spread more swiftly, are far more challenging to treat, and are less responsive to the vaccine, meaning that the protection one may receive from the vaccine may not be as effective as it would be to normal cases though it still provides a great amount of protection. While the healthcare workers are still overworked as the duration of the pandemic does not falter, vaccines seem to be the only reliever against the great pressure the healthcare system faces with the pandemic. It is also remembered with great persistence that the vaccination holds the utmost importance in the overcoming of the pandemic.
In addition, there were a few new trends in the patients’ choices. People tend to prefer private hospitals as the public hospitals were inclined to be occupied with COVID-19 cases. With that, people who preferred public hospitals started to gravitate towards opting for private hospitals. Besides that, Turkey has faced a great plummet in medical tourism as the pandemic continued with problems in related industries such as transportation.
Although the pandemic continues, the key solution is crystal clear: vaccine. As long as vaccination is done diligently, we can go back to the normalcy we all yearn for and take a great burden from the healthcare system while doing so.
Work Cited
Gündüz, Yavuz. “Sağlık Sektörü Covid-19'Dan Nasıl Etkilendi?” Hospitalmanager, 24 June 2021, https://www.hospitalmanager.com.tr/saglik-sektoru%CC%88-covid-19dan-nasil-etkilendi/.
“Aşılama Sağlık Sistemini Ayakta Tutuyor.” Son Dakika Haberler, https://www.trthaber.com/haber/koronavirus/asilama-saglik-sistemini-ayakta-tutuyor-609653.html.
“Koronavirüs Salgını, Türkiye’de Sağlık Çalışanlarının Psikolojisini Nasıl Etkiledi?” BBC News Türkçe, BBC, https://www.bbc.com/turkce/haberler-dunya-53176482.
“Do Covid-19 Vaccines Protect against the Variants?” Mayo Clinic, Mayo Foundation for Medical Education and Research, https://www.mayoclinic.org/coronavirus-covid-19/covid-variant-vaccine#:~:text=Early%20research%20from%20the%20U.K.,caused%20by%20the%20delta%20variant.
COVİD 19 pandemi̇ Süreci̇ni̇n Sağlik … — Tuseb.gov.tr. https://www.tuseb.gov.tr/tuspe/uploads/genel/files/haberler/zirve2021_sunumlar/DilaverTengilimoglu-TUSPEZirve-Sunumu.pdf.
