Healthcare professional experiences of making surgical oncology decisions and delivering COVID-19 safe care: a qualitative study

Abstract

Background

The COVID-19 pandemic was declared a public health emergency in March 2020. The British National Health Service (NHS) redirected medical attention towards prioritising COVID-19-positive patients in favour of less urgent care affecting cancer service provision. This study aims to explore experiences of healthcare professionals (HCPs) and investigate the impact of COVID-19 on decision-making in surgical oncology.

Methods

HCPs with experience in surgical oncology were recruited from January 2021 to June 2021. Qualitative semi-structured telephone interviews were conducted and transcribed verbatim. Interviews were conducted until data saturation. Thematic analysis was used to identify frequently discussed themes.

Results

A total of 13 participants were interviewed, identifying three main pandemic-related challenges: multi-disciplinary team (MDT) processes – telephone pre-operative assessments impoverished information elicited from in-person examination; service delivery – personal protective equipment (PPE) added complexity to surgical practice and more difficult communication; work routines – increased workload to deliver COVID-safe remote practices and decreased training time.

Conclusions

COVID-19 influenced cancer service provision with teams making significant changes to ensure that effective clinical reasoning and surgical standards were maintained. Managing safe COVID-19 surgical care impacted daily-life and work stressors. Post crisis, service delivery is looking to integrate telemedicine within care whilst reducing its impact on workload and in-practice training.

Keywords:

• COVID-19
• surgical oncology
• decision-making
• qualitative

Ethics approval

This study and methods are classed as a cross-sectional observational study, exempting it from requiring a research ethics approval.

Consent to participate

Informed consent was obtained from all individual participants included in the study.

Consent to publish

Individual or identifiable participant information has not been used in this study.

Author contributions

All authors contributed to the study conception and design. Material preparation, data collection and analysis were performed by Salonee Shah and Alanah Kapur. The first draft of the manuscript was written by Salonee Shah and Alanah Kapur and all authors commented on previous versions of the manuscript. All authors read and approved the final manuscript.

Disclosure statement

The authors have no relevant financial or non-financial interests to disclose.

Data availability statement

The datasets generated during and/or analysed during the current study are available from the corresponding author on reasonable request.