Pandemic-prompted changes enable wartime diabetes care
Dramatic changes in diabetes care delivery in Ukraine necessitated by the COVID-19 pandemic have proved indispensable during the Russian invasion.
In a piece published May 29, 2020, in the Journal of Diabetes Science and Technology, Dr. Mankovsky described how the pandemic hit just as Ukraine’s health system was pivoting from government controlled to insurance based.
Prior to the pandemic, patients with both type 1 and type 2 diabetes were regularly admitted to hospital for routine checkups, insulin dose management, and other treatments, a “remnant of the Soviet-era medical practice, which emphasized heavily on hospital admissions,” Dr. Mankovsky said in an interview.
This was the case, he wrote in the article, “despite the common understanding that such a system was a waste of resources ... this policy was changing much slower than we wanted.”
But the COVID-19 pandemic changed that practice “abruptly and dramatically,” so that all hospitalizations for patients with diabetes were stopped unless there was a real metabolic emergency.
Subsequently, Dr. Mankovsky wrote, “almost every health professional recognizes the particular importance of the new ways of communications with patients and with other colleagues.”
Indeed, in his email to this news organization, Dr. Smirnov mentioned that the routine diabetes management work he is still able to do remotely despite the extreme disruption in his region “is easy because of long-term COVID-period experience.”
Also because of the pandemic, insulin prescriptions were switched from traditional paper to electronic transfer, so that patients could easily pick them up at the pharmacy. “This new ... system proved to be not just very convenient for all parties involved, but in the current situation, it allowed us to prevent so many medically unnecessary visits to the clinics, which otherwise would have presented the real threat to the patients’ health and risk to get them infected,” Dr. Mankovsky wrote in 2020.
Now with the new danger, he said, “the inability to see patients is probably the least of our problems.”
A version of this article first appeared on Medscape.com.