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.

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Updated 2020-12-17

Tags

SARS-CoV-2 (COVID-19)

Biomedical Sciences