Universal Health Coverage and COVID-19 Pandemic: A Bangladesh Perspective
Abstract
Background
Like many other countries around the world, Bangladesh adopts Universal Health Coverage (UHC) as a national aspiration. The central theme of its providing quality and affordable health services which is a significant element of social protection. This paper was aimed to provide a narrative understanding of the perspectives of UHC in Bangladesh towards COVID-19 based on the existing literature.
Methods
We conducted a review combining articles and abstracts with full HTML and PDF format. We searched Google Scholar, ScienceDirect and Google using multiple terms related to UHC, COVID-19 and Bangladesh without any date boundary and without any basis of types of studies, that is, all types of studies were scrutinized.
Results
This short description highlights that the current pandemic COVID-19 holds lessons that health systems and economies in several countries like Bangladesh are not in enough preparation to tackle a massive public health crisis. It reports the shortage of health workers, scarcity of personal protective equipment, limited and ineffective diagnostic facilities, inadequate infrastructure of health care facilities, scarcity of drugs, and underfunded health services. Further, COVID-19 pandemic highlights the country’s health system needs an ongoing rehab post-COVID-19 with strong coordination in governance, in health economics, in health systems, in information systems, as well as in community participation in health to achieve UHC.
Conclusions
Addressing the needs for UHC achievement, it is important to break down the access barriers and keeping up to date all the activities addressing public health crisis like COVID-19.
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