What you should know:
1. The guidance takes a phased approach to reintroducing elective care and covers several types of procedures.
2. The societies developed seven guiding principles to follow when reintroducing care:
- Collaborate with public health officials and health systems to ensure it’s safe to begin performing elective procedures
- Create a transparent collaborative plan for COVID-19 testing and draft policies around personal protective equipment use before reintroducing procedures
- Expect different regions to be at different response levels as the pandemic progresses
- Use different invasive procedures and diagnostic tests in response to the COVID-19 response level
- Minimally invasive procedures with shorter lengths of stay are preferable if both options have similar efficacy and safety
- Use less-invasive testing or alternative imaging if both tests are similarly effective
- Maintain extra capacity in case of a second surge in COVID-19 cases
3. The report also includes a table detailing three levels of response, which the societies noted was created to give maximum flexibility when moving between levels in a region.
View the full guidance here.
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