Concept
Rescheduling and Reprioritizing Patient Visits Based Off Current Condition and Relative Patient Risk
- Most interventions scheduled with patients in the short term that are considered elective should most likely be postponed in order to limit infection risk
- However, interventions which are to be performed to assess a possible life-threatening symptom or condition must still occur and should be carried out accordingly
- These various situations must be assessed on a case by case basis in order to make sure each patient is receiving the proper level of care based on their condition
- This paper provides a graphic, Figure 1, specific to SHD which describes various patient conditions and their severity in order to provide a clearer picture on what visits could be considered elective versus essential
- However, Figure 1 is not based upon a linear scale and is heavily dependent upon other risk factors at a specific facility such as the occupancy of COVID-19 positive patients within the ICU, the paper implies that with low COVID-19 ICU occupancy, urgent procedures should most likely be performed. But if there is high COVID-19 ICU occupancy, urgent procedures should be more heavily screened based off a risk/benefit profile to assess if putting the patient in danger during recovery outweighs their current circumstances.
0
1
Updated 2020-12-17
Tags
SARS-CoV-2 (COVID-19)
Biomedical Sciences