Poor quality
Most fever clinics have established a relatively complete infection
management system in China. Nevertheless, the system could not be fully
implemented in the pandemic due to insufficient professional management
personnel, which resulted in shortage of services. Even worse was the
lack of formal training for the management personnel in fever clinics;
for example, it was reported that 28% of the infection management staff
never received professional training in public health or infectious
disease 10.
Moreover, the healthcare professionals in fever clinics were not fully
aware of their work responsibilities. They simply considered that the
role of fever clinics was similar to general clinics that were meant to
mainly determine the treatment plan for the patients11. Indeed healthcare workers in fever clinics are
expected to sensitively detect potential patients with infectious
diseases, and distribute them accordingly. While infected patients
should be isolated immediately and guided to receive further
examinations and diagnosis, the non-infected patients are transferred to
other outpatient clinics as needed. In addition, the healthcare
professionals were not sufficiently qualified to communicate or manage
patients in fever clinics 10. For instance, it was not
uncommon that they ignored the patients’ overwhelming stress and anxiety
while in communication, which may increase undue panic of the patients
and their families.
Another major limitation relied on that most existing fever clinics did
not have standardized procedures that guided healthcare workers to
practice in a concise and effective fashion. Furthermore, a considerable
proportion of fever clinics did not meet the construction standards
including lack of quarantine facilities and poor ventilated condition.
All these limitations led to poor quality of fever clinics to triage
patients and control nosocomial infection.