Surgical Protocols before and after COVID-19—A Narrative Review

Abstract

The COVID-19 epidemic has affected not only people’s daily lives but also the working methods of clinicians, surgical procedures, open/minimally invasive procedures, operating room management, patient and healthcare worker safety, education and training. The main objective of this study was to review selected articles and determine the changes in the general surgery protocols/procedures before and after the emergence of the COVID-19 pandemic. The literature was carried out in PubMed-Medline, Cochrane Library, Embase, Scopus and Google Scholar. The terms utilised for the searches were “SARS-CoV-2”, “Surgery”, “COVID-19”, “Surgical protocol”, “Surgical recommendations” and “before and after”. A total of 236 studies were identified, out of which 41 studies were included for data extraction. Significant changes in all the articles were observed with respect to the surgeries done before, during and after the COVID-19 pandemic. Specifically, the number of elective surgeries were considerably fewer in comparison to the pre-pandemic period. Since the COVID-19 pandemic started, hospitals all throughout the world have conducted significantly fewer procedures, particularly elective/non-urgent surgeries.