Overview

Countries are now at a critical juncture. Many health systems are catching up on service backlogs which accumulated throughout the pandemic with different degrees of success. This article identifies the determinants of growing waiting lists, and explores the different policies used to treat COVID-19 patients while also treating non-COVID patients and reducing backlogs. These include improving surge capacity or productivity, centralising coordination and optimising planning, increasing the supply of infrastructure and the health workforce, enhancing digital solutions, assessing payment and incentive systems and redesigning service provision. Some of the strategies are particularly demanding on the workforce, thus policies to support health workers should be implemented in parallel.