Proceedings of The 13th International Conference on Management, Economics and Humanities
Year: 2022
DOI:
[PDF]
Hospital Management during the COVID-19 Pandemic
Abdullah Ghaleb Alshareef
ABSTRACT:
Managing a hospital is highly complex due to the broad range of services hospitals deliver to a diverse population, especially during the COVID-19 pandemic. Hospital managers have faced a number of important management challenges during the COVID-19 pandemic. This qualitative study was conducted to explore the perceptions and views of the hospital managers of the key challenges facing health care. This study adds to the small body of qualitative knowledge into experiences of the COVID-19 pandemic in public hospitals and aims to provide insight into hospital managers’ perceptions of the key challenges facing health care. The qualitative data was collected through fifteen semi-structured interviews using a thematic analysis. Five interviews were conducted via an online program and ten were conducted face to face. Participants were health care professionals including hospital managers, a director of medical services, a director of patients’ affairs, a director of a nursing department, and managers who work directly with COVID-19 cases. The data analysis identified five main themes; namely, shortages of health care professionals, especially nurses, transporting infected patients to departments for services, the lack of adequate capacity to handle surging patient volumes, lack of clear approaches and protocols for workers, workload increase, personal burnout, and difficulty entering the patients into the hospital. The findings of this research provide insights for the challenges experienced by hospital managers and provide direction for future improvements in hospitals to overcome these difficulties.
Keywords: capacity, challenges, workload, shortages, protocols.