Abstract
COVID-19 has impacted health systems globally with varying impacts across regions. In Zimbabwe, a country with perennial problems of shortage of healthcare workers and resources, the pandemic has caused substantial strain on the public health system. The ability to share experiences on what has worked and what has not can be valuable as scientists, policymakers, and others determine steps forward and reflect backward to determine lessons learned in the pandemic response. We describe the setup and function of a COVID-19 rapid response team in the context of a limited resource setting. The response had to be tailored to make maximal use of the resources available and manage the outbreak. In this article, we share notes from the field and discuss the process of setting up a rapid response protocol in a limited resource provincial hospital, the challenges encountered, improvised interventions and recommendations for managing a COVID-19 resurgence and future similar pandemics.
Highlights
Setting up a rapid response team in an institution that had no formal emergency response protocols and guidelines came with its challenges
Some of the countries which have had considerable success in containing the pandemic, with relatively less mortality and negative economic consequences, like South Korea and China, have learnt and addressed the weaknesses revealed by past pandemics like severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) in 2003 and Middle East respiratory syndrome (MERS) in 2015
This pandemic has changed how health workers provide care, are deployed and managed. It has exposed the consequences of the lack of attention to health workforce considerations and how necessarily these are for improved pandemic preparedness and responsiveness
Summary
Setting up a rapid response team in an institution that had no formal emergency response protocols and guidelines came with its challenges. With limited resources at the hospitals disposal, the RRT had to come up with a functional outline on how to proceed and set out reasonable objectives.
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