Background
SARS-CoV-2 led to the 2019 coronavirus outbreak (COVID-19) and recently became a pandemic infection. COVID-19’s disease mortality rates range from 1% to above 5% across many countries and are still rising. Patients receiving palliative care are the most fragile patient group. Palliative care employees treat terminal patients in the hospital, and go into the community to conduct in-home palliative care service. Because palliative care medical staff need to work between the hospital and community every day, they have become a high-risk group for COVID-19 infection.
Methods
We need a comprehensive care strategy to avoid COVID-19 cross-infection, and protect patients, medical staff, and family members. We divided participants into hospital care and palliative home care to discuss the different strategies. We will use the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats (SWOT) to analyze preventive strategies.
Results
We formulated different strategies, mainly by grading and triage, to avoid contact with high-risk latent infections, and used cleaning, disinfection, and personal protective equipment to block possible transmission. Although strict preventive measures had strengths to stop community outbreaks, there are many threats to providing effective palliative care.
Conclusions
Facing the severe global COVID-19 epidemic, we must have strict strategies to protect our patient and medical staff. But we need to obtain balance between epidemic prevention and palliative care. Preventing the ill patients from feeling lonely or abandoned is also important.