Articles: coronavirus.
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Palliative medicine · Jul 2021
Understanding and addressing challenges for advance care planning in the COVID-19 pandemic: An analysis of the UK CovPall survey data from specialist palliative care services.
Specialist palliative care services play an important role in conducting advance care planning during COVID-19. Little is known about the challenges to advance care planning in this context, or the changes services made to adapt. ⋯ Professionals and healthcare providers need to ensure advance care planning is individualised by tailoring it to the values, priorities, and ethnic/cultural/religious context of each person. Policymakers need to consider how high-quality advance care planning can be resourced as a part of standard healthcare ahead of future pandemic waves. In facilitating this, we provide questions to consider at each level of the Social Ecological Model.
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Int. J. Infect. Dis. · Jul 2021
The initial impact of a national BNT162b2 mRNA COVID-19 vaccine rollout.
This study examined the initial impact of a national BNT162b2 vaccine rollout on SARS-CoV-2 infections in Qatar. ⋯ The results were consistent with an early protective effect of BNT162b2 vaccine against all degrees of SARS-CoV-2 severity.
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Our hospital used to perform cesarean delivery under general anesthesia rather than neuraxial anesthesia, mostly because of patient refusal of members of the conservative Bedouin society. According to recommendations implemented by the Israeli Obstetric Anesthesia Society, which were implemented due to the severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus-2 (SARS-CoV-2) pandemic, we increased the rate of neuraxial anesthesia among deliveries. ⋯ We demonstrated that patient and provider education about neuraxial anesthesia can increase its utilization. The addition of a trained obstetric anesthesiologist to the team may have facilitated this transition.
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The COVID-19 pandemic has inundated emergency departments with patients exhibiting a wide array of symptomatology and clinical manifestations. We aim to evaluate the chief complaints of patients presenting to our ED with either suspected or confirmed COVID-19 to better understand the clinical presentation of this pandemic. ⋯ Our research highlights an important aspect of the evaluation and management of COVID-19 patients in the emergency department. Our study identified most common chief complaints, chief complaints differences across age groups, and 7 distinct groups of COVID-19 symptoms. This large-scale effort to classify the most commonly reported symptoms in ED patients provides public health officials and providers with data for identifying COVID-19 cases.