- Isolation and Triage of Epidemic Prevention in Hospital
Since February 2020, COVID-19 has spread from China to other countries in the world, leading to an explosion of imported cases in Taiwan and a potential crisis of community infection. Therefore, epidemic prevention in hospitals has become particularly important. In general, triage is mainly based on patients, and the isolation is mainly based on hospital staff. As for the isolation and triage of inpatients, in addition to the negative pressure isolation ward, a special epidemic prevention ward should also be set up to treat suspected patients, and the principle of one room for one person should be followed. As for the related medical staff, it is necessary to divide the area to avoid cross-area working1. The most important challenge of isolation and triage is the personnel allocation, because the more detailed the division, the more people are needed. An “isolation and triage” mechanism allows COVID-19 to be “well-managed”. After the work in the hospital has been “grouped”, if there is a nosocomial infection, the scope of isolation area and the number of isolation personnel will be relatively reduced. This mechanism has become the key to keep the medical workforce in operation during the epidemic of COVID-19. Taiwan Central Epidemic Command Center (CECC) required hospitals to propose an "Isolation and Triage" plan during the epidemic prevention period of COVID-19 [1].
- Current Pharmaceutical Services in Hospital
To effectively manage and distribute the pharmacy manpower in Taiwan medical centers, the mode of “Central Pharmacy” has been adopted in the past 10 years, and the “patient-centered” mode has been designed to plan the manpower distribution in each workplace of the pharmacy. The pharmacy is a medication supply center for all units of the hospital (e.g., outpatient and emergency, hospitalization, surgical treatment, chemotherapy and TPN), and continues to provide clinical pharmacy and drug counseling services. Therefore, the pharmacy must ensure that medicines to be available and distributed to hospital patients during an emergency such as pandemic [2]. In addition, in order to meet the modern needs of various pharmaceutical operations, the pharmacy has a number of large-scale operating equipment (e.g., oral drug packaging machines, powder grinding machines, dispensing tables, BSC (Biological Safety Cabinets) for chemotherapy, TPN (Total Parenteral Nutrition) sterile operation tables, mobile drug storage cabinets and drug refrigerators). They are all fixed devices, and they are indispensable elements in modern pharmaceutical service [3]. Taking the Hospital as an example, by March 2020, there were 125 pharmacists in charge of the above work. Therefore, under the limitation of immovable environmental equipment, how to effectively plan the manpower of each unit in the pharmacy in the face of the COVID-19 outbreak and make the sustained operation and service of the pharmacy to provide the most basic pharmaceutical services become an important issue in the epidemic prevention work of the medical center [4,5].
- Research Purposes
By planning the isolation and triage of pharmaceutical service in different epidemic levels, the incidence of cross or cluster infection in the event of nosocomial infection is expected to be effectively reduced, and sufficient pharmacy services can be maintained.