The impact of delaying surgery during the COVID-19 pandemic in Alberta: a qualitative study
Bibliographic record
Abstract
BACKGROUND: The COVID-19 pandemic overwhelmed health care systems, leading many jurisdictions to reduce surgeries to create capacity (beds and staff) to care for the surge of patients with COVID-19; little is known about the impact of this on patients whose surgery was delayed. The objective of this study was to understand the patient and family/caregiver perspective of having a surgery delayed during the COVID-19 pandemic. METHODS: Using an interpretative descriptive approach, we conducted interviews between Sept. 20 and Oct. 8, 2021. Adult patients who had their surgery delayed or cancelled during the COVID-19 pandemic in Alberta, Canada, and their family/caregivers were eligible to participate. Trained interviewers conducted semistructured interviews, which were iteratively analyzed by 2 independent reviewers using an inductive approach to thematic content analysis. RESULTS: We conducted 16 interviews with 15 patients and 1 family member/caregiver, ranging from 27 to 75 years of age, with a variety of surgical procedures delayed. We identified 4 interconnected themes: individual-level impacts on physical and mental health, family and friends, work and quality of life; system-level factors related to health care resources, communication and perceived accountability within the system; unique issues related to COVID-19 (maintaining health and isolation); and uncertainty about health and timing of surgery. INTERPRETATION: Although the decision to delay nonurgent surgeries was made to manage the strain on health care systems, our study illustrates the consequences of these decisions, which were diffuse and consequential. The findings of this study highlight the need to develop and adopt strategies to mitigate the burden of waiting for surgery during and after the COVID-19 pandemic.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.005 | 0.007 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".