Elsevier

One Health

Volume 10, December 2020, 100137
One Health

Repurposing and reshaping of hospitals during the COVID-19 outbreak in South Korea

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.onehlt.2020.100137Get rights and content
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Highlights

  • Repurposing and reshaping of hospitals could be working on containing COVID-19 outbreak and limiting nosocomial infections.

  • Dedicated COVID-19 hospitals and COVID-19 emergency centers provided focused care during COVID-19 outbreak in South Korea.

  • COVID-19 community facilities and respiratory care split hospitals were established to mitigate the outbreak in South Korea.

  • Reallocation of healthcare personnel/facilities was critical given the shortage of health care resources.

Abstract

During the extensive outbreak of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) in South Korea, many strategies in the hospital setting, such as stratified patient care, the assignment of hospitals/beds by a task force team, and the establishment of dedicated COVID-19 hospitals, dedicated COVID-19 emergency centers, COVID-19 community facilities, and respiratory care split hospitals, were adopted to mitigate community transmission and prevent nosocomial infection. Most of these strategies were used during the Middle East Respiratory syndrome outbreak and were applied again successfully during the COVID-19 outbreak. The reallocation of health care capacity, repurposing of hospitals, and close collaboration between the government and the health care committee might have been the key to successfully addressing the crisis of COVID-19 given the shortage of health care resources.

Keywords

COVID-19
Outbreak
Nosocomial infection
South Korea

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