COVID-19

The COVID-19 pandemic highlighted major challenges in governance and inequalities particularly among those from Black, Asian and minority ethnic (BAME) groups. This paper focuses on the BAME community and explores this through a governance lens, with particular reference to the representation and functioning of boards involved in healthcare and building a transparent culture. To illustrate this, the paper utilises a series of structured reflective questions with model answers termed Right Question, Right Answer and links to the Centre for Quality in Governance (CQG) Maturity Matrix.

Background Studies to evaluate long COVID symptoms and their risk factors are limited. We evaluated the presence of long COVID and its risk factors in patients discharged from a hospital with COVID-19 illness.

Methods This observational study included 271 COVID-19 patients admitted between February and July 2020 in a hospital in the UK. The primary outcome measure was to assess the duration and severity of long COVID and its predictors at 3, 6 and 9 months. Logistic regression was performed to assess the potential risk factors for long COVID.

Background Nosocomial outbreaks of COVID-19 have been reported sporadically since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic. We sought to study the transmission dynamics in a nosocomial COVID-19 outbreak in our centre.

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Background During the COVID-19 pandemic, care home residents and staff were identified as being at risk of infection. Their safety was important, but equally important was safe delivery of healthcare to those who needed it. The Welsh Government provided care homes with video consulting (VC) to deliver safe healthcare to the vulnerable, combat isolation and protect the residents and staff.

Haemoglobin (Hb) Cheverly is a rare, low oxygen affinity haemoglobinopathy. It is a result of point mutation at the 45 codon of the beta globin genes that leads to substitution of phenylalanine by serine. It is characterised by spuriously low peripheral oxygen saturation with normal arterial oxygen saturation. We describe a family of three with Hb Cheverly in Sarawak General Hospital, Malaysia. It was discovered through incidental finding during hospital admission for unrelated complaints.

Background Telephone and video-based triage of dyspnoea has become commonplace and clinicians are faced with a new challenge in risk stratification of patients with dyspnoea due to suspected COVID-19. This review aimed to identify existing remote assessment modalities for acute dyspnoea which can be applied during pandemics.

Public health ethics is the discipline that ensures that public health professionals and policy makers explain what they do, and why. During the COVID-19 pandemic, ethical deliberations often did not feature explicitly in public health decisions, thus reducing transparency and consistency in decision-making processes, and resulting in loss of trust by the general public. A public health ethics framework based on principles would add to transparency and consistency in public health decision-making.

Against a background of stalling UK life expectancy, the COVID-19 pandemic is a major crisis for public health with impacts differing markedly by ethnicity, gender, and age. Direct health impacts include mortality and long-term harms among survivors. Social disruption and lockdown measures arising from uncontrolled infection have destabilised healthcare and other essential services. The economic crisis resulting from the pandemic is already triggering job losses, which will in turn have their own adverse health effects.