Health in crisis

Abstract

Introduction: In december 2019, the World Health Organization (WHO) was informed of cases of pneumonia of unknown etiology in the city of Wuhan, China. Subsequently a novel Coronavirus - SARSCoV-2 was isolated and identified. On March 11, 2020, the WHO declared a pandemic, which implied the adoption of a set of urgent measures worldwide that restricted rights and freedoms, leading to crisis situations, especially in the health area. Objectives: This study aims to assess the impact of the pandemic on users’ access to health services. Methodology: An integrative literature review was carried out, according to the PICO methodology, whose data collection was performed in April 2021, in SciELO, RCAAP, Cochrane Library, LILACS, and PubMed databases, with the following keywords: Pandemic; Access to Health Services. The inclusion criteria were articles published and indexed in scientific databases between March 2020 and April 2021, full access to the document, articles related to quantitative/qualitative studies that portrayed the theme pertinent to the objective of the work and that answered the guiding question and articles in Portuguese, English and Spanish. And as exclusion criteria, quantitative / qualitative articles that did not address the theme, articles that did not answer the guiding question and were far from the theme, and articles from RIL, master’s dissertations or doctoral theses. A total of 284 articles were found, and after checking the inclusion and exclusion criteria, 3 articles were selected. Results: The analysis of the articles included in the study allowed addressing the impact of restrictive measures, raised by the Pandemic, on access to health care. Conclusion: The Sars-Cov-2 Pandemic had implications in the access to health care, with the suspension of treatments, consultations and surgeries, prioritizing urgency and emergency situations, increasing morbidity and mortality due to preventable and treatable diseases.