Adapting to the COVID-19 pandemic: A survey of UK and European hand surgery units

Shaw, Abigail; Holmes, David; Jansen, Victoria; Fowler, Christy L; Wormald, Justin C.R.; Wade, Ryckie; Reay, Emma; Gardiner, Matthew

doi:10.1016/j.bjps.2021.11.052

Cited by 7 publications

(15 citation statements)

References 27 publications

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“…In some cases [9], residents were allowed limited access to the hospital. Lastly, at the authors' university, as at others [9,14], lessons switched from in situ to webinars, leading to a decreased possibility of interaction between professors and residents.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Healthcare workers were not immune to this tragic event, nor were hand surgery centers. All around the world, rapid changes occurred in the organization of wards and activities to adapt to new necessities [9][10][11][12][13][14][15]. In best-case scenarios, hand surgeons were required to adapt to a reduction of hand surgery activity, whereas, in other cases, some colleagues had to change jobs to help in COVID wards.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Other changes were brought, including the use of absorbable skin sutures and less frequent check-ups with patients when possible. Additionally, Atia et al [17] described checking up on patients less frequently, whereas most of authors used telemedicine to follow up with their patients [12,14,[22][23][24]. This is a method that proved its accuracy [25] and found satisfaction among patients [10,22,26], whereas surgeons had frequent issues [10,22].…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The authors did not use telemedicine, and Toia et al [11] as well as Leti Acciaro et al [27] confirmed it might be an issue in Italy. To reduce contamination risks [28], some surgeons increased non-surgical treatment [9,23], and to resolve issues linked to a diminution of anesthetists' availability, many hand surgeons [9,12,14,17,24,29] stated to use WALANT surgery [30].…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Finally, being from a teaching hospital, it is difficult not to speak of the impact that the COVID-19 pandemic might have had on resident physicians. As in many other hospitals [10,11,14,19], the authors had all their elective surgery canceled during the first months after the beginning of the lockdown, and still highly diminished during the year that followed, creating a significant lack in young hand surgeons' formative experience. In some cases [9], residents were allowed limited access to the hospital.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 4 more Smart Citations

One Year of COVID-19: Lessons Learned in a Hand Trauma Center

Covino

Fulchignoni

Pietramala

et al. 2022

JCM

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2020 will be remembered worldwide as the year of COVID-19 outbreak. The onset of this pandemic abruptly changed everybody’s life and, in a particular manner, doctors’ lives. Our hand surgery department became rapidly one of the first COVID-19-specialized wards in Italy, impacting considerably the authors’ routines and activities. In this paper, the authors focus on how the demographics of patients with hand trauma changed and how they had to modify their activity. The authors retrospectively took into consideration all patients reaching their emergency department (ED) with hand trauma between 9 March 2020 (the day of the beginning of the first lockdown in Italy) and 8 March 2021 and compared them to those who reached the ED in the three previous years. Authors have analyzed the number of patients, their gender and age, the severity of their trauma, where the trauma occurred, the type of lesion, the percentage of patients who underwent surgery, and the percentage of patients who had an emergency admission. In the last year, the number of patients reaching the ED for a hand trauma has been reduced by two thirds (975 patients during the past year), the mean age of those patients has slightly increased, the severity of cases has increased, places of trauma and type of lesions have changed, and, lastly, the percentage of patients needing surgery who were admitted immediately has increased. This paper shows how the type of patients reaching the ED changed and discusses how surgeons evolved and modified their habits in treating those patients during the first lockdown and the year that followed.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%