Life After COVID-19: Rethinking the Healthcare System and Valuing the Role of Citizens' Engagement in Health Prevention

On December 2019, the city of Wuhan, Hubei Province in China,was hit by an unexplainablyaggressive pneumonia with unknown origin (Lu et al., 2020).Its initially rapid spread was then imputed to a novel class of coronavirus, Sars-CoV-2 and,on February 11th 2020, the disease was named Covid-19. In thefollowing months, the viraltransmission increased exponentially to the entire countryand all around the world and theoutbreak was officially declared a pandemic by the World HealthOrganization (WHO) on 11thMarch (Lu et al., 2020; Sohrabi et al., 2020).As it shows, the first month of the new decade have been dominated by an unprecedentedemergency which has called for a timely and exhausting response on behalf of governmentsand policy-makers stressing, now more than ever, the impellent need to strengthen the capacityof national healthcare systems. While the world watched all social, economic, and productivesectors drastically decelerating their pace, Intensive Care Units, diagnostic laboratories, GeneralPractitioner surgeries, and all other healthcare servicesfound themselves over-pressurized andworking their fingers to the bone, entailing an over-exposition to burn-out and psychosocial risksof the workforce. According to the Health System Response Monitor platform by the EuropeanObservatory (European Observatory on Health Care Systems and Policies, 2020), many Europeannational governments have been mobilizing special funds to increase workforce capacity or payovertime to their healthcare workers. Some countries have responded to the sudden change indemand by timely reorganizing hospitals through shifts in resource allocation and, in some cases,private funding and donations have played a significant role inincreasing ICU capacity. Othersectors have been also called to action via solicitations ofindustrial reconversion to respond to theshortage of Personal Protective Equipment (PPE), in a desperate attempt to safeguard hospitalswhere conditions are, in some cases, so desperate that patients are laid on floor mattresses (Nacotiet al., 2020). Of course, to save healthcare facilities from being the main vectors of Covid-19 spreads,as suspected to be the case for some hospitals in Italy, the use of appropriate PPE and sanitizationprocedures must occur alongside correct preventive behaviorin the workplace. Integrating suchcomportments into routine clinical practice is the result of proactive behavior on behalf ofphysicians, nurses, and all other healthcare professionals however, ensuring that healthcare facilitiesremain safe environments is a responsibility also of patients and their caregivers. This also requiresa shift in patients’ attitudes and approaches toward their healthcare management, in the directionof better engagement.