Resilience, pandemic and surgical oncology of the breast
There is a psychological property that I have observed in many cancer patients. This is RESILIENCE.
Resilience is the process of adapting well in the face of adversity, trauma, tragedy, threats or significant sources of stress such as serious health problems LIKE BREAST CANCER, or the SARS COVID-2 pandemic.
Can we learn this ability from our patients and take advantages to improve our practice in this contingency.
Here four possible opportunities for the breast surgical oncologist:
- During this outbreak we experienced a sudden shortage of resources, less theatre time, less anesthetists, sometimes less bed available, even trivial surgical masks quickly disappeared leaving surgeons incredulous and disoriented. Well the first lesson will be: how can we manage to increase the efficiency of our practice and get the same outcomes reducing the operating times and the complexity of surgery.
- A long waiting list is likely to be generated in the next few months. This opens unexpected ROOM for pharmacological research previously neglected by surgeons. Provided that the clinical trial system will still be in place, more patients could enter RCT of neoadjuvant treatment, and this will be certainly a great opportunity for patients and a big boost to research likely to increase survival after breast cancer.
- According to the ACS triage guidelines in selected conditions, without theatre facilities available, patients not candidate to neoadjuvant treatment should be observed. Now, in normal times for some of these patients observation would be considered unethical, whereas in the pandemic era a new field of observation may rise to understand better the natural history of the disease.
- Another hypothesis may be related to management of the waiting list. If this cannot be escaped due to shortage of resources can we manage to use time from diagnosis to treatment better? This could let patients be more prepared to receive treatment creating sort of pre-habilitation rather than re-habilitation. In the era of obsessive research for quality of life are we sure that rush from diagnosis to treatment is the right way to improve outcomes? Will the COVID 19 outbreak make patients more self-conscious— if still alive of course???
ALL THESE TOPICS will be discussed by a team of young experts coming from the hotspots all over the world. United states-Italy-Spain-Iran-China and so on.
Please stay tuned contact us at our email address and join us next Tuesday: [email protected]
Giuseppe Catanuto MD
Consultant Oncoplastic Breast Surgeon
G.Re.T.A. Executive Chairman
Stay safe, Stay home!
#GretaOncoplastic #NeverStopLearning #GretaOncoplasticWebinar #Surgery #Covid19
[bctt tweet=”Giuseppe Catanuto MD invites you at new G.Re.T.A. webinar “Breast Surgery during the COVID 19 emergency” on 7th of April at 4 PM (GMT+0) #GretaOncoplastic #NeverStopLearning #GretaOncoplasticWebinar #Surgery #Covid19″ username=”GretaOncoplast”]
