Rethink Thoracic Surgery as a Whole After the Pandemic: How to optimize resources and deliver excellent patient care

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Background

Surgical operating units, among which in particular thoracic surgery departments, are cost-intensive, multi-professional parts of health-service production. Managing these units efficiently is essential when hospitals and healthcare systems aim to maximize health outcomes with limited resources. In dynamic surgical environments, in order to deliver excellent patient outcomes in terms of quality and safety, continuous resource optimization is mandatory. Given the complexity of the many activities in a surgical department, this process necessarily involves multiple aspects, ranging from technological innovation in both operating rooms and wards, to the development of constructive and satisfactory collaborations between prepared and motivated staff members. Therefore, improving thoracic surgery departments efficiency and capacity requires coordination across multiple personnel and complex processes that can be difficult to manage. Careful data collection and their analysis, together with constant comparison with national and international scientific community, are mandatory to obtain successful results.

The COVID-19 pandemic, outspread at the beginning of 2020, had a massive impact on health-services all over the world. Concerning surgical departments, the influence of COVID-19 on daily practice has been widespread, ranging from workforce and staffing issues, procedural triaging, peri- and intra-operative infection risk, unification of different wards, changes to peri-operative practice and ways of working alongside the consequences on surgical education and training. To face the effects of the pandemic, many measures have been adopted, consisting of reorganization of facilities, redeploying staff, prioritizing oncological cases and telemedicine introduction or improvement. If on the one hand many aspects of the emergency have worsened work activity, on the other it gave us the opportunity to develop changes that were previously unthinkable and to rethink our departments on the basis of the experience gained. Based on these considerations, our aim is to take this opportunity for change and propose a Research Topic on how to best optimize resources in thoracic surgery to further improve patient care in the near future.

Therefore, we propose the following list of topics that will be addressed by worldwide famous experts according to the experience in their departments. Review articles and original research are both accepted.

• How to increase OR efficiency
• How to increase ward/clinics efficiency
• How to reduce mistakes in surgery
• How to reduce variability of care
• How to motivate and retain staff
• Non surgical skills for surgeons (lateral thinking, understanding and communicating with different personalities, teaching)
• How to create an academic department
• How to set up an institutional database
• Standardization of procedures to contain cost and reduce variability of care

Keywords: pandemic, thoracic surgery, resources, technological innovation, revolution

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