Challenges for maintaining surgical care practices in the COVID-19 pandemic: an integrative review.
José Erivelton de Souza Maciel Ferreira, Tahissa Frota Cavalcante, Raphaella Castro Jansen and 4 others
PMID 35485629WHAT IT FOUND
During COVID-19, surgical services had to move staff and beds to intensive care, postpone elective operations, follow delayed-surgery patients, and counter misinformation and distress.
This review maps service challenges, not evidence that a treatment works.
Key findings
01The most cited challenges were transfer of operating-room resources to emergency units and ICUs (25.9%), postponed elective surgery backlogs (22.2%), and hiring doctors and nurses (18.5%).
02Following up patients whose surgeries were postponed was an important challenge (14.8%).
03One identified challenge was increased attributions to the perioperative service nurse (1 article, 3.7%).
STILL TO COME
How it was doneWhat they foundWhat it means for RNs
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What it does not show
Most included articles were descriptive reports or opinion pieces; 12 (44.44%) were level 6 evidence, so the review describes challenges rather than tested solutions. The search used one descriptor crossing and a limited set of databases, and the authors say they did not exhaust all sources, so relevant studies may be missing. Only 27 articles answered the guiding question, and most were published in medical journals, so the findings may not capture all nursing or allied health perspectives. The review reports no patient outcomes, complication rates, mortality, or effectiveness of any surgical rearrangement.
The easy way to misread this
Do not read this as evidence that postponing elective surgery, moving operating-room staff, or changing perioperative routines improved safety. The paper is a review of service challenges, not a patient outcome study.