Why the study?
Surgical procedures in COVID-positive patients are associated with worse outcomes, making it challenging to determine when recovered patients are safe for surgery.
A structured preoperative evaluation protocol for previously COVID-19-positive patients can help safely triage and optimize patients for elective surgery.
The preoperative evaluation and risk assessment has always been a critical aspect of safe surgical practice, and in the midst of the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic, it has become even more crucial to patient safety. Emerging data show that surgical procedures in patients who test positive for coronavirus disease (COVID) are associated with worse clinical outcomes and increased postoperative complications and mortality. In addition to personal protective equipment (PPE) management, isolation protocols, preoperative SARS-CoV-2 screening, and steps to ensure clinician safety, determining how to deem patients who have recovered from COVID-19 safe to proceed is an added challenge. We present a preoperative protocol for evaluation of previously COVID-positive patients for elective surgery.
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Bui et al. (2021) studied this question.
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