Abstract
The article examines Israel’s experience in managing the COVID-19 vaccination program beginning in December 2020. Utilizing principles of mass casualty event management, such as triaging, flow of casualty care, and flexibility (among others), we analyze Israel’s vaccination program. The successful Israeli experience was found to be based on timely coordinated and adaptive health system logistics and operations, as well as cooperative population behaviors.
Highlights
We suggest that, based on the Ashkenazi et al (2010) [4] model, there are three basic components of mass casualty event (MCE) management in the context of the vaccination operation: (1) decision making, (2) mission execution, and (3) continuous flexible adaptability
Storage and distribution: Once the decision to purchase vaccine doses for the entire population had been made, the logistical procedures were carefully planned and exercisedfrom the moment the packages arrived in the country, to their storage, to their distribution to the vaccination areas around the country, and overall safety control
We described the Israeli management of the COVID-19 vaccine program using the framework of Mass Casualty Events
Summary
Managing a pandemic crisis such as COVID-19 poses huge challenges to countries. Such challenges include: coping in uncertain settings given the unknown nature of the pandemic’s distribution and its potential health effects, the need to gain public adherence to movement and gathering restrictions in order to control and prevent outbreaks, and the immediate need to adjust the healthcare system’s capacities to mitigate overwhelm. Mitigation policies posed a “symmetrical solution” to an “asymmetrical problem” [1] These have led to massive disruptions of social and economic systems, with an ongoing dispute on the “acceptable loss” [2], i.e., finding the fragile balance between preventing the healthcare system’s insufficiency while opening the economy and maintaining life routines as much as possible. Given these challenges, it has become clear that managing the COVID-19 pandemic demands a multi-organizational response based on rapid decision making in a setting of uncertainty, risk management, coordination, and continuous flexible adaptation. What can be learned from the Israeli experience of the COVID-19 vaccination program?
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