Ireland needs to examine three key aspects of the public health system in order to be prepared for pandemics or other crises in the future.
That is according to Professor Sam McConkey, an expert in infectious diseases at the Royal College of Surgeons in Dublin.
Life is returning slowly to normality as the Omicron wave eases here, with hospitalisations and ICU admissions decreasing in recent weeks.
However, the pandemic is not over and there is still "a lot of uncertainty" regarding the trajectory of coronavirus, Prof McConkey said.
But looking to the future when the worst of Covid-19 is behind us, he believes there are three actions that need to be undertaken to safeguard the country from the effects of another pandemic or infectious disease outbreak.
The first of these is a review of Ireland's response to the virus over the past two years by an impartial body.
"What we need to do in Ireland is a governance look back on our decision making over the last two years and ask ourselves, did our structures of government, our policymaking, our Department of Health, Cabinet, NPHET, our leaders do the best possible job," Prof McConkey told the Irish Mirror.
"Sometimes after a major national emergency it's good to look back and I think now is the time to look back and ask are the processes that we used optimal or do we want to invent new ones for the next pandemic.
"There will be more pandemics and national emergencies and we need to be prepared for them and ideally do that in a non-party/political way.
"I'm talking about a less partisan and more about structures of governance review."
"It's a time for learning how we can do it better next time as a county."
The second action he believes should be taken is to bolster investment in the country's public hospitals.
Prof McConkey said: "The second thing I think we need to do better is [regarding] our health service - we learned that a lot of people in hospital caught Covid unfortunately and are still.
"The six-bedded rooms we have in a lot of our public hospitals are not suitable in the middle of a respiratory or airborne/droplet pandemic.
"I feel there's a need for huge public investment and capital investment to convert our six-bedded tooms in all of our public hospitals into single rooms.
"[Six-bedded wards] are not really good for infection control, their structure is just not fit for purpose. Shared bathrooms with six people in a room are just not adequate for infection control purposes.
"I accept that it's expensive to convert and build these into single rooms, I'm not saying it's not a big amount of money but I think it has to be said out loud and we need to recognise that the physical infrastructure of our public hospitals has not served us at all well during this pandemic."
Thirdly, the infections disease expert wants to see an upgrade to the health's system's processes and to see it modernised in order to improve many issues across the population.
"The third thing I would say for the future is we realised our public health system was depleted, the computer systems are 20 and 30 years old, the outbreak investigation software was really old, they didn't have the ability to scale up contact tracing as quick as was needed and our scale-up testing for covid as quickly as was needed," Prof McConkey said.
"My view is we need a review of the public health and population health governance and staffing and software and processes and a big investment in keeping our population health strong, not just for problems like pandemics but even for things like road accidents, anxiety for all the other public health problems.
"Those same structures can help for lots of health issues in our nation."
