Call for action: Health services in the European region must adopt integrated care models to manage Post-Covid-19 Condition
Hans Kluge, Natasha Azzopardi‐Muscat, Satish Mishra, Susanne Nielsen, Florian Tille, Dina Pfeifer, Long COVID Europe, Manoj Sivan
Abstract
The COVID-19 pandemic has affected more than 216 million individuals in the European Region with more than 1.9 million deaths. Most countries have mobilised their resources to manage the waves of hospital admissions and intensive care cases and to prioritise the vaccination effort to protect as many people as possible against severe cases of COVID-19. The emergency response has had a major economic, health and social impact across societies in most of the countries of the European region. While the pandemic is far from over, the pressure on health systems is multiple: Not only do they have to treat the current COVID-19 cases, but also maintain and restore all other essential health services that have often been disrupted throughout the pandemic response, leading to substantial backlogs in many countries.