A multidisciplinary approach to triage patients with breast disease during the COVID-19 pandemic: Experience from a tertiary care center in the developing world

Authors

Abida K. Sattar, Aga Khan UniversityFollow
Hania Shahzad, Aga Khan UniversityFollow
Adnan Abdul Jabbar, Aga Khan UniversityFollow
Azmina Tajdin Valimohammad, Aga Khan UniversityFollow
Sadaf Khan, Aga Khan UniversityFollow
Yasmin Vellani, Aga Khan UniversityFollow
Romana Idrees, Aga Khan UniversityFollow
Nasir Ali, Aga Khan UniversityFollow
Imrana Masroor, Aga Khan UniversityFollow
Humera Saeed, Aga Khan UniversityFollow
Gulzar S. Lakhani, Aga Khan UniversityFollow
Nadia Ayoub, Aga Khan UniversityFollow
Atif Waqar, Aga Khan UniversityFollow
Muhammad Zia-Ul Islam, Aga Khan UniversityFollow
Salman Kirmani, Aga Khan UniversityFollow
Asad Latif, Aga Khan UniversityFollow
Ather Enam, Aga Khan UniversityFollow

Document Type

Report

Department

Anaesthesia; Paediatrics and Child Health; Pathology and Laboratory Medicine; Psychiatry; Radiology; Radiation Oncology; General Surgery; Neurosurgery; School of Nursing and Midwifery, Pakistan

Abstract

Background: The COVID-19 pandemic has created a need to prioritize care because of limitation of resources. Owing to the heterogeneity and high prevalence of breast cancers, the need to prioritize care in this vulnerable population is essential. While various medical societies have published recommendations to manage breast disease during the COVID-19 pandemic, most are focused on the Western world and do not necessarily address the challenges of a resource-limited setting.
Aim: In this article, we describe our institutional approach for prioritizing care for patients presenting with breast disease.
Methods and results: The breast disease management guidelines were developed and approved with the expertise of the Multidisciplinary Breast Program Leadership Committee (BPLC) of the Aga Khan University, Karachi, Pakistan. These guidelines were inspired, adapted, and modified keeping in view the needs of our resource-limited healthcare system. These recommendations are also congruent with the ethical guidelines developed by the Center of Biomedical Ethics and Culture (CBEC) at the Sindh Institute of Urology and Transplantation (SIUT), Karachi. Our institutional recommendations outline a framework to triage patients based on the urgency of care, scheduling conflicts, and tumor board recommendations, optimizing healthcare workers' schedules, operating room reallocation, and protocols. We also describe the "Virtual Blended Clinics", a resource-friendly means of conducting virtual clinics and a comprehensive plan for transitioning back into the post-COVID routine.
Conclusion: Our institutional experience may be considered as a guide during the COVID-19 pandemic, particularly for triaging care in a resource-limited setting; however, these are not meant to be universally applicable, and individual cases must be tailored based on physicians' clinical judgment to provide the best quality care.

Comments

Pagination are not provided by the author/publisher

Publication (Name of Journal)

Cancer Reports

Recommended Citation

Sattar, A. K., Shahzad, H., Jabbar, A. A., Valimohammad, A. T., Khan, S., Vellani, Y., Idrees, R., Ali, N., Masroor, I., Saeed, H., Lakhani, G. S., Ayoub, N., Waqar, A., Islam, M. Z., Kirmani, S., Latif, A., Enam, A. (2021). A multidisciplinary approach to triage patients with breast disease during the COVID-19 pandemic: Experience from a tertiary care center in the developing world. Cancer Reports, 4(1), e1309.
Available at: https://ecommons.aku.edu/pakistan_fhs_mc_surg_gen/100

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.