COVID-19 Outbreak: Hospital Response Strategy, a guidebook on hospitals’ response strategy to COVID-19 outbreak complied from SAHZU's frontline experience is released on April 11. Based on SAHZU’s pratices on the frontline, the book aims to lend general applicability and reference value to a wider audience.

Its English and Chinese versions are now open for free download on GMCC (Global MediXchange for Combating COVID-19, covid-19.alibabacloud.com), an online communication and collaboration program jointly established by the Jack Ma Foundation and Alibaba Foundation with the support of Alibaba Cloud Intelligence and Alibaba Health. More translated versions are coming soon.

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When a raging pandemic is taking the world by storm, hospitals are at the frontier of the battle.

Since the outbreak of COVID-19 in China, on top of receiving and screening huge numbers of patients with fever symptoms, SAHZU also sent 7 medical squad of 189 healthcare professionals to help out hard-hit areas including Wuhan, where ordinary wards were quickly converted into ICUs to treat the most critical and severe patients.

How to accurately screen out COVID-19 patients? How to prevent nosocomial infection? How to send help to hard-hit areas in this difficult situation?

It was a major test of our management capacity when all of those challenges were thrown at us on every front. We had zero doubt that without proper management and targeted response, medical staff would end up having infections or patients would get infected inside the hospital. If the hospital itself can’t even function properly, care for our patients would be impossible. This is a grim challenge not just for the hospital president but for the whole hospital staff to grapple with.    

All resources at hand were immediately mobilized to ensure efficient response to the crisis. Thus far, SAHZU hasn’t had a single case of staff infection on the frontline. Nor had we missed out on a single high-risk or suspected case. And every critical and severe patient had received timely treatment. 

When the COVID-19 is ebbing away in China, we took the time to do the aftermath by recording all the experiences and lessons learned during the fight in this guidebook. The guidebook shed lights on all the administrative measures that SAHZU adopted during the COVID-19 outbreak, covering eight areas including: human resources, space management, infection control, medical processes optimization, medical supplies and logistics support, IT support, hospital-government cooperation as well as society-wide coordinated prevention and control. We also shared the know-hows and lessons learned from our Wuhan experiences.

We believe that despite all of the differences among hospitals in terms of institutional frameworks, geographic conditions, economic capabilities as well as cultural contexts, the fundamental pathways and strategies to respond to the COVID-19 should be consistent. We would like to share this journey of ours for everyone’s reference.

The Coronavirus knows no borders and is an enemy that we all fight against. We wish that by sharing what we know, we are able to contribute, in whichever possible way, to this global fight against the COVID-19. We also welcome valuable input from health professionals worldwide.

SAHZU is a hospital with 150 years of history and culture who has always been on the frontline fighting for people’s lives. From the leprosy outbreak in the 1890s in Hangzhou to the most recent COVID-19 outbreak in China, SAHZU has been at the frontier of the battlefield translating its core value of putting patients and customers first into its anti-epidemic efforts.

The “SAHZU mode” of curbing the disease spread was formulated from its efficient management system and effective response strategy. It didn’t fail the trust from our community and society and delivered applauded performance during this silent combat against the virus.

Meanwhile, SAHZU has been actively communicating with the world, sharing experience in prevention and containment, clinical therapy and nursing, and hospital infection control. Over 100 medical institutions and government authorities in 15 countries like the United States, UK, Ireland, Pakistan, Kenya, Ethiopia have learned about the SAHZU COVID-19 experience.