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Guest post: COVID Secure Surgery


Authors: Aneel Bhangu (@aneelbhangu), University Hospital Birmingham, UK, a.a.bhangu@bham.ac.uk Dhruv Ghosh, CMC Ludhiana, India Maria Picciochi (@MariaPicciochi), Hospital Prof Doutor Fernando Fonseca, Portugal Dmitri Nepogodiev (@dnepo), University Hospital Birmingham, UK
COVID Secure Surgery

Virtually all elective surgical services around the world suffered some form of shutdown due to the COVID-19 pandemic1. Now, patients and surgeons are desperately looking to re-start services. Efforts to re-start after the first waves faced multifactorial challenges, including patient safety and ensuring enough staff along the whole patient pathway to support operating theatre availability.2,3

The impact of the reduction in surgical capacity is likely to be staggering. Initial estimates of 28 million cancelled operations likely escalated to 50 million towards Autumn 2020, and may now be in excess of 100 million. That is only one part of the story, since the many undiagnosed patients with surgical conditions sitting in the community over the last 12 months may never make it to a surgeon or waiting list. Without adequate surgical capacity, there will be a major global decline in population health due to the burden of a full range of inadequately treated non-communicable diseases. 

There is no single factor or solution that will enable surgery to re-start at scale, quickly. There is no single set of solutions that will work across every region. Since every single hospital around the world functions differently, context specific and whole system solutions are needed. 

Vaccination will hopefully provide solutions to the current pandemic, although the global rollout is occurring at different paces globally, meaning surgical recoveries will differ. Cultural challenges across countries are adding to this variation. Unlike acute major incidents which disable elective surgical but are quickly over (e.g. major trauma or bombings), this pandemic has exposed specific, longer-term weaknesses of current systems. Post-pandemic planning will now happen across all spectrums of society. Surgeons need to lead efforts to create resilient elective surgical services that are pandemic resistant for the future, advocating for hospital and political awareness. 

The COVIDSurg collaborative has taken a data driven approach to supporting safe surgery, and for 2021-2022 will provide further data to support re-starts globally. Data is needed across the whole system and patient pathway, that includes referrals, preoperative selection, perioperative testing and safety, postoperative risk reduction, and structural organisation of hospitals4–6

Figure 1 – Centres enrolled in COVIDSurg studies

Learning from other non-medical disciplines, surgeons have little barometer of how secure their elective surgical services are compared to everyone else’s. COVIDSurg will deliver a validated Elective Surgery Resilience Index in the first half of 2021, allowing surgeons to test their systems and identify areas for immediate strengthening. 

Re-starting surgery safely will be a complex interplay of these multiple factors. Not all resources will be available across all regions, and in some resource limited settings, surgery is at risk of being seen as a burden. To further support the re-start, an easily accessible, digital, online toolkit is needed that will provide key take-home messages and downloadable pathways for surgical teams to take and adapt. This will include the ability to self-certify individual department and hospital level of COVID Secure Surgery. This will provide the building blocks to provide ring-fenced, pandemic secure surgery by 2030.

Conflicts of interest: We have no conflicts of interest to declare.

Funding: No funding was received for this blog article.

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