COVID-19: Impacts on the Ophthalmology Urgency
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.48560/rspo.23851Keywords:
Coronavirus Infections, COVID-19 , Emergency Service, Hospital; Eye Diseases, Facilities and Services Utilization, Ophthalmology, PandemicsAbstract
Introduction: The COVID-19 pandemic settled in Portugal in March 2020 and its consequences are still poorly understood. This study intends to evaluate the impact of it on the type of diagnoses and severity of the situations that appeared in the Emergency Department (ED) of Ophthalmology at the CHUC (Centro Hospitalar e Universitário de Coimbra) in the first months of the pandemic. Possible reasons for the changes observed are being discussed and the aim is to improve the organization of the teams and their differentiation, should new restrictions on the functioning of society and medical care arise.
Methods: Retrospective observational study on the casuistry of the CHUC Ophthalmology SU on March 1 to June 30 of 2019 and 2020. The chi-square test was applied to compare the number of monthly visits to the SU by diagnosis of admission after normality analysis with the Shapiro-Wilk test and the T test for independent samples compared the number of admissions in the two years. The data were provided by the CHUC Information Technology and Systems Service.
Results and Discussion: The total number of visits to the CHUC Ophthalmology SU decreased from 5 709 to 3 490 (-38.9%) in the months under study (p <0.05). Conditions such as blepharoconjunctivitis (-69.7%) and acute conjunctivitis (-66.5%) were those that suffered the greatest decrease. The pathology that suffered proportionally less change was a foreign body in the cornea (+ 2.7%). On the other hand, diagnoses such as vitreous hemorrhage (+ 61.6%) and unspecified retinal detachment (+ 37.5%) increased in absolute frequency, although the impact of the pandemic on them is not proven (p> 0.05). The containment measures implemented, the fear of COVID-19 infection in the hospital and a decrease in occupational accidents are some of the causes mentioned.
Conclusion: There is a clear association between the beginning of the pandemic in our country and the reduction of visits to the ED, which led to the decrease in less urgent cases and the increase in more serious diagnoses such as retinal detachment and foreign body in the cornea. The response to non-urgent cases must be improve so as not to overburden the ED with conditions that do not require immediate or face-to-face treatment.
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