Screening During a Pandemic In the early days of the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic, many preventative services were rescheduled or postponed in order to preserve personal protective equipment (PPE) as well as protect the community and vulnerable patient populations. With breast and lung cancer screenings occurring daily in Bayhealth’s Imaging Centers prior to COVID-19, it became imperative to determine how preventative medicine and screening services could resume while protecting patients and staff. “Screenings are an important part of staying healthy. If screening and, subsequently, finding a cancer are delayed, the treatment gets more complicated. We always want to prevent that delay,” said Bayhealth Cancer Institute Manager Stephanie McClellan, MBA, MSN, RN, CMSRN, NE-BC. In order to introduce patients back into the screening setting as safely as possible, several procedural changes and protective measures were implemented. First, the lung
navigator became a liaison for the Imaging Center and the patient to establish an open line of communication between them. Similarly, calling patients to discuss their need for a lung cancer screening and the importance of not delaying this service became a priority. A similar setup was created for breast cancer screenings. The Imaging Centers also designed new ways to screen patients while protecting the patient and the care provider from potential COVID-19 exposure. While the screening methodologies did not change, the mechanisms surrounding them were modified to minimize risk and exposure for patients, which was imperative for life-saving screenings to resume and continue. A universal mask policy for patients, enhanced PPE for all providers, rigorous sanitation, and physical distancing are just a few of the changes Bayhealth’s Imaging Centers have made to ensure patient safety during a screening exam.
Understanding COVID-19 and Cancer Cancer care in the community has evolved over the years, and in 2020, this was no different. The Novel COVID-19 virus transformed the way we think about care delivery and the impact on patients and their exposure risk. With so much uncertainty and many questions unanswered, the American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO) opened a survey to collect information about patients who have cancer and are diagnosed with COVID-19. One of the primary goals of this COVID-19 registry is to help the cancer community identify and learn more about patterns of symptoms and the severity of COVID-19 in cancer patients. With so many variables to consider, the Bayhealth Cancer Institute decided to participate in the study. After enrolling, it was able to start contributing
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real-time information to the registry. As of November 2020, Bayhealth was the only cancer program enrolled in Delaware. “Participating in the ASCO COVID-19 registry is about understanding symptoms and how those could have a correlation to patient outcomes. Understanding more about this will help us make the best possible decisions for the patients we care for and their treatment. Through baseline and follow-up data we will be able to see how delivery of cancer care is affected, the outcomes patients have and the long-term impact into 2021,” said Bayhealth Cancer Institute Medical Director Rishi Sawhney, MD.
COVERING COVID
