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Occupational Challenges for Healthcare Workers During Pandemic

"A pandemic is a disease outbreak that spread across countries or continents. It affects more people and takes more lives than an epidemic" (WebMD,2009). The World Health Organization (WHO) declared COVID-19 to be "a pandemic when it became clear that the illness was severe and that spread quickly over a wide area". During the epidemics, Community Health Workers promoted pandemic preparedness by acting as community-level educators and mobilisers, contributing to surveillance systems, and filling health service gaps. The ethics manual of the American College of Physicians, for example, states that the ethical imperative for physicians to provide care overrides the risk to the treating physician, even during epidemics. The American Medical Association asserts that individual physicians' should provide urgent medical care during disasters, emphasising that this duty persists even in the face of greater than usual risks to physicians' safety, health, or life (The New York Times - Breaking News, US News, World News and Videos,2020). The objective of the paper is to know about the role of institutionalised health workers in the critical Pandemic period and later for its preparedness, too, and to identify the concerns related. The study was conducted by interviewing professionals, especially nurses, in pandemic duty and data by gathering secondary sources like books, journals, periodicals and newspapers, etc. It is found that by liberating Medical Practitioners, clinicians and health workers from other tasks and commitments, they focus more on their immediate needs. Taking adequate precautions like wearing masks and other personal hygienic methods can improve combating the COVID pandemic effectively. Provision of food, decompression time, and adequate time is also equally crucial as protective equipment. Keywords: Pandemic, Health, COVID, Preparedness, Precautions
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