We Asked the Experts: How Do We Maintain Surgical Quality Standards for Enhanced Recovery Programs After Cancer Surgery During the COVID-19 Outbreak?

Excerpt

Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) is a novel viral disease that has spread rapidly worldwide, becoming a pandemic. Among infected patients, around 20–30% of patients will require intensive care unit (ICU) admission due to acute respiratory distress syndrome [1]. Consequently, the health care workforce allocation has been widely disrupted at an institutional level in an attempt to manage the surge of COVID-19 patients requiring ICU care. While the workload has increased in all institutions fighting the outbreak, intensivists and ICU nurses are at risk of physical and mental exhaustion. Consequently, anesthesiologists and non-ICU nurses are being re-assigned to serve as in intensive care settings. As part of the general effort, elective surgical caseload has been substantially decreased to allow for better ICU and hospital bed capacity. In this setting, surgical procedures should be restricted to life threatening conditions requiring emergent surgical management. …