Considering potential benefits, as well as harms, from the COVID-19 disruption to cancer screening and other healthcare services

Katy Bell; Fiona Stanaway; Kirsten McCaffery; Michael Shirley; Stacy Carter

doi:10.1071/phrp32122208

RESEARCH ARTICLE (Open Access)

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Considering potential benefits, as well as harms, from the COVID-19 disruption to cancer screening and other healthcare services

Katy Bell ^A ^B ^* , Fiona Stanaway ^B , Kirsten McCaffery ^A ^B ^C , Michael Shirley ^A and Stacy Carter ^A ^D ^E

+ Author Affiliations

- Author Affiliations

^A Wiser Healthcare Research Collaboration, Sydney, NSW, Australia

^B School of Public Health, Faculty of Medicine and Health, University of Sydney, NSW, Australia

^C Sydney Health Literacy Lab, Faculty of Medicine and Health, University of Sydney, NSW, Australia

^D Australian Centre for Health Engagement, Evidence and Values, University of Wollongong, NSW, Australia

^E School of Health and Society, University of Wollongong, NSW, Australia

^* Correspondence to: katy.bell@sydney.edu.au

Public Health Research and Practice 33, e32122208 https://doi.org/10.17061/phrp32122208

Published: 15 March 2023

2023 © Bell et al. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International Licence, which allows others to redistribute, adapt and share this work non-commercially provided they attribute the work and any adapted version of it is distributed under the same Creative Commons licence terms.

Abstract

Since 2020, hundreds of thousands of more deaths than expected have been observed across the globe. Amid the coronavirus 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic, current research priorities are to control the spread of infection and minimise loss of life. However, there may be future opportunities to learn from the pandemic to build a better healthcare system that delivers maximum health benefits with minimum harm. So far, much research has focused on foregone benefits of healthcare services such as cancer screening during the pandemic. A more balanced approach is to recognise that all healthcare services have potential harms as well as benefits. In this way, we may be able to use pandemic ‘natural experiments’ to identify cases where a reduction in a healthcare service has not been harmful to the population and some instances where this may have even been beneficial.

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