Abstract
BackgroundCOVID‐19 outbreak prompted health centres to reorganize their clinical and surgical activity. In this paper, we show how medical genetics department's activity, in our tertiary pediatric hospital, has changed due to pandemic.MethodsWe stratified all our scheduled visits, from March 9th through April 30th, and assessed case‐by‐case which genetic consultations should be maintained as face‐to‐face visit, or postponed/switched to telemedicine.ResultsOut of 288 scheduled appointments, 60 were prenatal consultations and 228 were postnatal visits. We performed most of prenatal consultations as face‐to‐face visits, as women would have been present in the hospital to perform other procedures in addition to our consult. As for postnatal care, we suspended all outpatient first visits and opted for telemedicine for selected follow‐up consultations: interestingly, 75% of our patients’ parents revealed that they would have cancelled the appointment themselves for the fear to contract an infection.ConclusionsSpread of COVID‐19 in Italy forced us to change our working habits. Given the necessity to optimize healthcare resources and minimize the risk of in‐hospital infections, we experienced the benefits of telegenetics. Current pandemic made us familiar with telemedicine, laying the foundations for its application to deal with the increasing number of requests in clinical genetics.
Highlights
In Italy, "genetic consultants," after graduating in medicine, acquire training and experience in genetic counseling through a specific residency program
Aim of this present paper is to show how, in a tertiary pediatric hospital, our medical genetics department's activity has changed due to COVID-19 outbreak
We opted for telemedicine consultations to return genetic tests results: following every remote consultation, we drafted a detailed report and sent it by e-mail protected by a password communicated exclusively to the patient's family/caregiver
Summary
In Italy, "genetic consultants," after graduating in medicine, acquire training and experience in genetic counseling through a specific residency program. Given the non-postponable nature of most of our prenatal consultations and considering that women would be admitted to the hospital on the same day to undergo other procedures, we performed all the scheduled consultations as face-to-face visits.
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