Reduce Your Risk of COVID-19 During Spine Surgery
By Admin | April 01, 2021
Now there’s a trove of guidelines and consensus statements. Particular attention has been paid to safety protocols for spine surgery, with its unique risks of virus transmission from emergent procedures. (Nobody wants to extubate a patient who may have COVID-19, but that’s par for the course in this pandemic era.)
Even so, not all spine specialists and surgeons are crystal clear on optimal ways to stay safe. Would you be able to answer these questions, or at least the ones relevant to your job?
- How should staff respond to potential COVID-19 exposure during surgery?
- When is it appropriate to schedule telemedicine visits?
- How can we reduce aerosol generation in the operating room?
- Who determines what procedures are elective and thus should be delayed?
You’re probably up to your elbows in safety protocols, and that’s good. After all, we‘re not out of the woods even with COVID-19 vaccinations. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention does not yet know to what extent coronavirus vaccines confer protection against the three new, more-contagious variants in the U.S. – the ones discovered in late 2020 and early 2021in the United Kingdom, South Africa, and Brazil.
Here are some strategies to reduce the risk of COVID-19 during spine surgery. How does your facility stack up?
Strategies from the Hospital for Special Surgery
If there’s one institution to model during the pandemic, it may well be...(More)
For more information please read, Reduce Your Risk of COVID-19 During Spine Surgery, by spineuniverse
