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.