The impact of COVID-19 on the organisation of surgical activity

The SARS-CoV-2 pandemic caught the world by complete surprise The whole healthcare system had to be reorganised in a very short time COVID-19 admitting hospitals had to be restructured overnight into parts with COVID-19 patients and parts with non-COVID-19 patients When working with surgical COVID-19 patients, a complete and consistent use of protective equipment is especially necessary to prevent infection of healthcare workers It is also important to organise special clinical pathways within hospitals to prevent contamination of non-COVID-19 parts of the hospital All elective surgeries have been temporarily cancelled We are beginning to rele-ase restrictions on elective surgery under special conditions to protect healthcare workers and patients COVID-19 swabs are recommended, but not strictly necessary, before elective surgery Swabs can be either negative or inconclusive in 30% of cases, and therefore cannot be comple-tely relied upon It is especially important that patients or their families did not have signs of a respiratory infection in the previous 14 days We must consider each patient as potentially infected with SARS-CoV-2 in the hospital The same is true for healthcare workers – when using protective equipment we must act as if each worker is potentially infected with SARS-CoV-2