Tracheotomy in the age of the COVID-19 pandemic: up-to-date review

• Authors: Jakub Piątkowski , Martyna Klecha , Dmitry Tretiakow , Andrzej Skorek

Abstracts

EN

Introduction: The SARS-CoV-2 pandemic is one of the biggest healthcare challenges that the medical environment has needed to face since many, many years. Clinicians all over the world present their recommendations for everyday procedures in order to provide safety to the medical staff as well as to patients. The disease leads to ARDS in many cases and some patients will require prolonged intubation; therefore, to avoid the negative aspects of this condition, a number of patients will undergo tracheostomy. Tracheostomy is an aerosol-generating procedure, therefore, when performed on a SARS-CoV-2-positive patient, there is a high risk of contamination both of the medical team and the operating theatre.
Aim: We describe a set of guidelines that we believe should minimize those risks. We focus on aspects like: presurgical testing, proper preparation of the operating theatre prior to the patients’ arrival, initial education of the medical staff participating in the surgery, patient’ transport and tracheostomy. We describe the critical points during every step and suggest ways to minimalize the risk of viral transmission.

Keywords

EN

ARDS; coronavirus; COVID-19; pandemic; SARS-CoV-2; tracheostomy

• Publisher: Index Copernicus International
• Journal: Polski Przegląd Otorynolaryngologiczny
• Year: 2020
• Volume: 9(3)
• Pages: 30-35

Dates

published

2020-06-19

Contributors

author

Jakub Piątkowski

author

Martyna Klecha

author

Dmitry Tretiakow

author

Andrzej Skorek

Identifiers

DOI

10.5604/01.3001.0014.2318