Practice recommendations for clinicians in ART centers in the context of COVID-19 pandemic: perspective of a developing
- PDF / 419,615 Bytes
- 2 Pages / 595.276 x 790.866 pts Page_size
- 91 Downloads / 145 Views
(2020) 25:28
Middle East Fertility Society Journal
CORRESPONDENCE
Open Access
Practice recommendations for clinicians in ART centers in the context of COVID-19 pandemic: perspective of a developing country Tarek A. Farghaly1, Mohamed Fawzy2 and Ahmed M. Abbas1,3* In December 2019, severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) firstly presented in a group of patients suffering from symptoms of pneumonia in Wuhan, China [1]. The disease caused by SARS-CoV-2 is coronavirus disease-2019 (COVID-19) that was considered as a worldwide pandemic by the World Health Organization, with more than 4,000,000 cases globally [2, 3]. In Egypt, in vitro fertilization (IVF) is a client-paid service with no medical insurance, the cost of IVF cycles is high relative to the average yearly income of Egyptians, and private centers mainly offer assisted reproduction services. Therefore, pragmatic solutions should be established to amend the recent guidelines to suit the local requirements in the context of the golden rule of “do no harm.” These solutions should be in conjunction with the latest guidelines to continue the proper management of patients while ensuring adequate resource allocation in response to COVID-19. We proposed the following measures adopted by an Egyptian IVF clinic to support the best practice and face the highly dynamic situation on day to day basis. This could provide guidance for low-resource countries that must cope with the pandemic for an extended period.
Triaging women based on their symptoms (fever,
cough) by phone call carried out by a medical intern prior to the scheduled visit to the ART center. For the new patients first seen in the center, triage is * Correspondence: [email protected] 1 Department of Obstetrics & Gynecology, Faculty of Medicine, Assiut University, Assiut, Egypt 3 Women Health Hospital, Assiut 71511, Egypt Full list of author information is available at the end of the article
performed before access to the clinic for consultation by a medical intern wearing the appropriate personal protective equipment (PPE). Ensuring proper social distancing through proper respect of the time of scheduled visits with spacing out the appointment intervals between patients to minimize the crowding in the waiting area. Additionally, preventing any relative to the couple to enter the IVF center, especially children or adults over the age of 60 years. Laboratory evaluation of all patients before initiating the IVF cycle treatment through complete blood picture, C-reactive protein, erythrocyte sedimentation rate, and serum ferritin [4]. Those with suspicious results are excluded from initiating any cycle treatment. Given the limited data on when COVID19 can be represented by blood level changes of the investigation mentioned above, we advise to repeat them once again on the day of ovulation trigger. Patients under immune suppression therapy and those who have medical disorders affecting the immune system are advised to postpone the IVF cycle treatment as the risk of acquirin
Data Loading...
