COVID-19 is a rapidly expanding global challenge, placing a huge burden on healthcare systems. There is no evidence to inform the management of surgical patients with COVID-19 infection. Sharing international experience is vital to inform the management of this complex group of patients, improving their clinical care.
CovidSurg is a collaboration of >2800 surgeons and anaesthetists from 115 countries delivering a set of studies to collect international data and efficiently inform clinical practice.
ESCP has established a successful network of surgeons, who have been sharing expertise with impactful outputs in the recent years. This is the case of the several published cohort studies already influencing clinical practice and the groundbreaking EAGLE trial. Many countries represented in ESCP are currently severely affected by COVID-19 and we believe CovidSurg studies are meaningful for them. Acknowledging that this is a stressful time for surgeons in Europe and beyond, we hope to turn real-world data from ESCP collaborators into decision-making tools that are globally applicable.
We would be delighted if you could join one or more of these studies:
Cohort studies aim to evaluate surgical patients management and outcomes:
- CovidSurg cohort study: will capture the outcomes of surgery for patients who have COVID-19 infection. It will include patients undergoing ANY type of surgery, who are diagnosed with COVID-19 infection at the time of surgery or within 30 days. Data can be collected either retrospectively or prospectively. For details and docs: https://globalsurg.org/covidsurgcohortstudy/
- Cancer-CovidSurg: will include all cancer patients with a tumor board decision for surgery (both operated and non-operated patients, COVID +ve and COVID -ve are included). This study aims to determine outcomes for patients who are operated during the pandemic, but also for the ones who have delayed surgery or alternative treatment. Participating centres can include one or more of these cancer types: Colorectal, Oesophagogastric, Head and neck, Lung, Liver, Pancreatic, Sarcoma, Kidney, Bladder, Prostate, Uterine, Ovarian and Breast. For details and docs: https://globalsurg.org/cancercovidsurg/
Modelling studies aiming to inform surgical resources and team planning:
- Surgical team model: to estimate how many surgeons get infected by COVID-19 and the impact of surgeons' sickness on surgical care delivery. Please contribute with real-world data here:
- English version: https://is.gd/covidsurgsurvey2
- Italian version: https://is.gd/surveyitalian
- Spanish version: https://is.gd/surveyspanish
- Elective cancelations model: to capture how many elective procedures are cancelled during the different phases of the COVID-19 outbreak. Data is under analysis.
We would be very grateful if you could contribute to this models with real-world data from your hospital and team.
Authorship will follow the GlobalSurg / ESCP Cohort Studies model, with all collaborators will be recognised with PubMed-indexed collaborative co-authorship on any resulting papers (example: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/29452941/).
To get involved, please register at: http://tiny.cc/covidsurg
Thank you for considering joining the CovidSurg collaboration.
CovidSurg Steering Group: Aneel Bhangu, Dmitri Nepogodiev, NIHR Unit on Global Surgery
