World Journal for Pediatric and Congenital Heart Surgery

Download COVID-19: Crisis Management in Congenital Heart Surgery

Preface

Our nation’s health care infrastructure faces unprecedented challenges in the face of the COVID-19 pandemic, and the congenital heart disease (CHD) community is no exception.These challenges include looming resource scarcities of equipment, personnel, and blood. In addition, there are the substantial infection risks to patients, family members, and staff. These factors necessitate thoughtful but often difficult decisions onhow to best triage patients with CHD. Our relatively small workforce adds another dimension to the challenge, since therapid spread of COVID-19 could result in program closure at a moment’s notice secondary to insufficient personnel from infection or quarantine. Although many sectors of our society can be placed on hiatus during this period of crisis, our patients’diseases continue to require care, particularly among newborns and infants who often necessitate operations during a narrow temporal window for satisfactory outcomes.