Impact of Novel Coronavirus Pandemic on Emergency and Elective Surgical Practice: A Retrospective Study in a Tertiary Care Center

Abstract

Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic has led to a significant worldwide impact on general surgical practice. Since the beginning of this pandemic, hospitals have become a hot zone for the transmission of coronavirus. Routine and emergency surgical services have been severely disrupted worldwide due to this pandemic and may continue to be so for some time if more mutations take place in the virus. As of February 27, 2022, at 9 a.m., 43.5 crore positive cases were confirmed worldwide with over 6 million deaths. In India, 42,916,117 positive cases were confirmed to this date with 513,756 deaths. The impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on surgery daily practice and surgical patients was very high. There was a high impact on elective, semi-elective, cancer surgery, transplant programs, and education programs in our institution during the COVID-19 era. The most common reasons were being reduced number of availabilities of non-COVID-19 beds in the general surgical ward, difficulty in separating COVID-19 and non-COVID-19 patients, high transmission, and infection rate of COVID-19, reduced number of surgical intensive care unit beds and operation theatre due to allotment of these exclusively for COVID-19 patients. The reduced number of staff and health-care workers due to posting in the COVID-19 ward was also a major factor in the reduced number of electives and other surgeries in our institution. We need to find ways to continue providing essential medical services to patients while fighting this pandemic since it might take longer than expected to end. The present report summarizes the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on our surgical services and the changes that we have adopted for better care of surgical patients and safe surgical practice to provide valuable information worldwide. This article also summarizes current evidence and recommendations for changes to surgical practice in our hospital according to the World Health Organization, Ministry of Health and Family Welfare, Indian Council of Medical Research, and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention guidelines to minimize the effect of the COVID-19 pandemic on surgical services.