Acute care surgery and COVID-19 pandemic: the voice of emergency surgical services

Abstract

During the course of the COVID-19 pandemic, surgical services around the world were greatly affected by the need for organizational and infrastructure modifications, accelerated training of primary teams, and strategies to allow for patient flow due to the confinement and disruption of economic activities. Acute care surgery departments are one of the departments that presented the greatest number of questions and concerns, due to the limited availability of supplies, technological equipment, trained and healthy personnel, among other aspects. Many of these modifications focused on strengthening emergency and critical care services, leaving aside the functionality of other services. However, this is a fatal mistake, since acute surgical illnesses cannot wait. A study carried out in the USA showed that although there was a decrease in the attendance to acute care surgery services during the first two months of the pandemic (57%), there was an increase in the severity of the symptoms presented (64%). Therefore, the authors concluded that acute care surgery during public health disasters is an essential health service. Similarly, the perception of specialists and health professionals working in this area complained about the conditions of risk of infection due to the absence of biosafety elements and administrative neglect.