Hospital Preparedness Checklists for Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19): A Review Study

Proper management of Coronavirus Disease 2019 pandemic requires that hospitals be prepared to face the disease. The aim of this study was to review the existing tools to access the preparedness of hospitals in confrontation with COVID-19 and make their Persian translation available to health policymakers and researchers.

This was a narrative review study. The existing tools were retrieved by online searching with suitable keywords in Google, Google Scholar and PubMed, in addition to hand searching in the websites of the relevant international organizations. Searches were limited to English documents, but no time limitation was considered. After removing duplications, 335 references were entered in Endnote-5. After screening for titles and abstracts, the full texts of the remaining referencing were screened and the required information was extracted. Finally, the structure and content of the found tools were compared and analysed.

In general, three checklists compatible with the purpose of this study were found and their translations were attached to this article.
One was the Checklist developed by the CDC of Europe containing 8 domains, 21 sub-domains and 135 items. The second was developed by the CDC of the US including 3 domains, 8 sub-domains and 80 items and the last one was developed by the WHO containing 11 domains and 104 items.

With regard to the content, there was a high similarity between the checklists. The minor differences on the checklists should be considered in localizing the tools. The next step should be choosing one checklist or making a checklist with combination of the available checklists and then making validation and localization of that checklist to be able to use it in different contexts.