Hospital Clinical Performance in a Post Covid-19 ERA. The Experience and Lessons learned from our retrospective survey at the Obstetrics & Gynecology University Hospital (OGUH) “Queen Geraldine” Tirana, Albania

Introduction: All the restricted and lockdown measures including the closure of the social and economic life that many Governments around the world applied to reduce the consequences of the COVID-19 Pandemic caused serious consequences in the activity of the health system.One of the most important and negative impacts of dealing with COVID-19 was the reduction in the volume and required of the structure of hospital activities.One of reported consequences was a slow pace on which the hospital's activity is returning to normal as defined by pre-pandemic levels.The main purpose of our survey was to assess the rate of return of these indicators to a more normal state, i.e. towards the levels set before the COVID-19 Pandemic. Study Method:We retrospectively analyzed the hospital clinical activity at the OGUH "Queen Geraldine" during the period from 2018 to 2023.Analysis of hospital clinical indicators covered the following periods: two years before the COVID-19 pandemic (2018 and 2019); two years during the COVID-19 pandemic (2020 and 2021); and, two years after the COVID-19 pandemic (2022 and 2023).The evidence from similar studies suggests that the above period definition will allow us to compare these indicators of the clinical performance (diagnoses, more specifically) for these three periods and draw the relevant conclusions.The OGUH clinical activity has been analyzed with the most frequent diagnoses of the main services such as Obstetrics, Gynecology, Obstetrics Pathology, Abortion and Outpatient Services.We calculated the average values for each of the three periods: before COVID-19 (A), during COVID-19 (B), and after COVID-19 (C).We analyzed the data using Excel and SPSS programs to obtain more descriptive and analytical statistics, making the appropriate comparisons and correlations.Statistical significance was estimated if p < 0.05 in 2-tailed P values. Results:Our study shows that the hospital's clinical performance indicators during the pandemic period (2020 and 2021) suffered a significant decline (Table 1).The comparison of the trend of the main clinical diagnoses in the periods before, during and after the COVID-19 pandemic in our hospital is reported in the (Table 2).Specifically: Normal births suffered a decline by 10.87% for the period during the pandemic compared to the period before the COVID-19 pandemic.The rate of decline continued even when the health emergency has been declared over, but was reduced to the previous level by 2.15%.This downward trend