The crisis affects the emergency medical department as a public safety sector because of the straining of resources that is directly associated with the crisis. In the event of the occurrence of the crisis in a specific location, the medical personnel that would be used in the crisis are the same who attend to regular patients in that region. As a result, there would be an imbalance in the number of medical staff needed and the medical staff available.
The nurses responsible for caring for the patients in the wards and ICU, for instance, would have to work with the covid-19 patients in the crisis regions to help them at least salvage their lives (Sadiq, Kapucu, & Hu, 2020). This situation would also call for the increase in the total amount of work hours for the healthcare personnel, which reduces the time they could otherwise spend on their own to rest and reenergize for the next tasks.
The cases of increased burnout among nurses and other medical personnel hence occur and reduce the delivery of healthcare to the regular members of the public. Specifically, when healthcare givers have clinical burnout, they are more likely to make medical errors, some of which are dangerous to the recovery process of the patient.
Also, they are likely to perform operations such as diagnosis imperfectly, where they would diagnose and treat patients for the wrong diseases. In such case scenarios, the members of public are directly affected in that the costs of care are raised significantly due to the increase of negative aspects such as re-hospitalization and readmission.
Another way in which the occurrence of the crisis situation affects the pubic medical sector is the creation of scarcity in medical equipment and supplies. To attend to any Covid-19 patient, healthcare givers need to have their full personal protective equipment to avoid catching the highly contagious disease. The hospitals, when procuring for equipment to be used in the care of patients, usually set a budget that would be used to manage all the equipment needs that may occur within the facility (Fernandez & Shaw, 2020).
With the crisis situation, it would be impossible to sustain the facilities involved in responding with their initial budgets, which calls for an ultimate increase in the total costs of operation. Besides increasing the costs of individual healthcare that would have to be initiated to fill the deficiency, some facilities have to introduce salary cuts and other measures such as reducing on costly employee privileges (Gigliotti, 2017). Unfortunately, these changes are more impactful on the patients as the end result is the reduction in the quality of care while increasing the costs.