| Abstract [eng] |
The master's thesis analyzes the provision of health care services in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic. Master's thesis consists of: list of concepts and abbreviations, introduction, 3 parts of teaching (theoretical, methodological and empirical), conclusions, recommendations, list of used literature, appendices. The introduction defined the relevance of the research, identified the purpose of the research, the object of the research, formulated problematic questions and defended statements, and set tasks. The first part is devoted to the theoretical analysis of the problem. As the health care system is one of the most important systems for ensuring social welfare in the states, the analysis of scientific literature and other sources reveals the concept of access to health care services as public services and its peculiarities in the context of a pandemic. It is emphasized that health care services must be of high quality, easily accessible to all, all specified legal acts and laws must be observed in health care institutions, and services should be provided in accordance with the norms and rules regulated by legal acts. There are three types of service availability: communicative, economic, and organizational. In Lithuania, as in the rest of the world, ensuring the organizational accessibility of public services had the greatest challenge in the COVID-19 pandemic. However, two problems with the availability of public medical services have been identified (postponement of scheduled services and remote consultation), for which the lack of timely solutions has made it particularly difficult to ensure the access of public health services. The second part of the work presents the research methodology, methods and their application in this research. An analysis of the content of legal documents was used to identify the ways to ensure accessibility and the key challenges in ensuring the availability of services to the Lithuanian health system during the COVID-19 pandemic. In the case of Panevezys District Municipality Polyclinic, a written survey (questionnaire) (quantitative survey) and an oral survey (semi-structured interview) (qualitative survey) were used to analyze the situation of access to primary health care services and ways to ensure accessibility. The sample of the study was 359 patients of Panevezys District Municipality Polyclinic and 2 heads of the institution. The ethical principles of research into justice, fairness, voluntariness and selflessness, voluntariness, confidentiality and anonymity have been respected. The third part of the work - research results. One of the most important authorities, the Government of the Republic of Lithuania, announced that it had encountered various (communication, organizational and economic) difficulties in ensuring the availability of medical services during the pandemic. However, an analysis of the legislation, a written survey and an oral survey (interview) showed that the main challenges of the pandemic were in ensuring communicative and organizational access to health care (from a patient perspective), while economic affordability remained virtually unchanged. The main directions of strengthening the availability of health care services (methods, solutions) identified in the case of Panevezys District Municipality Polyclinic are suitable for adaptation in other Lithuanian health care institutions as well: substantial changes in ensuring the availability of health care institutions and patients, compliance, increase of human resources, increase of contact services, training of staff, provision of hospital places, introduction of new services, etc. |
