Critical Care Innovations (Jun 2020)
The impact of COVID-19 pandemic on critical care and surgical services availability.
Abstract
The spreading of COVID-19 pandemic caused by the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus affects the entire healthcare system in the world. As one of the side effects of the pandemic, the need for surgery deferral has emerged. The purpose of this analysis is to review current literature discussing the issue of a limited access to critical care and surgical services. Following the outbreak of a pandemic, many national scientific societies, as well as numerous medical specialty associations, have begun working on developing guidelines to deal with these issues to enable access to medical services for the most seriously ill patients affected by COVID-19. Moreover, limited access to intensive care beds, shortages in personal protective equipment chain supply and the risk of an unintended spread of infection among the staff and the patients led to a severe limitation of all elective operations, mostly excluding oncological, ur-gent/emergent and trauma interventions. This period of uncertainty about the risk of virus transmission can last for many months, if not years. Therefore, it is necessary to develop such behavioral patterns that will allow us to work safely without limiting the number of elective operations and maintaining continuous access to critical and surgical care. As elective operations were cancelled in the world to the extent that history did not witnessed so far, there is a simultaneous unintended harmful effect of this phenomenon. The overall survival time of patients may be shortened, their quality of life might be reduced, the risk of complications and the need for critical care in the most severe cases will increase. Currently, it seems of the utmost importance to develop a plan for a safe return to elective surgery. At the same time, international organizations should warrant the development of alternative plans for dealing with similar events in the future.
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