India was already facing a shortage of surgeries, and then the pandemic hit. According to the Lancet Commission for Global Surgery, low and middle income countries like India require 5,000 surgeries per lakh population, to be able to meet the surgical burden of disease. However, we haven’t been able to hit anywhere near that amount. Only 29% of the estimated number of surgeries required took place, according to a pan-India surgery market report in 2020. When the pandemic happened in 2020, hospitals all around the world were naturally swamped, as they were dealing with an unprecedented level of people that required urgent medical care. In such situations, hospitals were forced to prioritise, leading to the cancellation of elective surgeries, so that there would be more beds and medical personnel available for those who had contracted the coronavirus. While this sounds like a reasonable decision, it’s not without major risks attached. The name elective is misleading— elective procedures are not always optional, most of the time they are so only in that the date can be pre-scheduled. Basically, an elective procedure is anything that isn’t an emergency surgery. This postponement of elective surgeries means that a lot of people with conditions such as cancer, cardiac problems, hernias and stones in the kidney or gall bladder who require these surgeries, risk their condition worsening. This can lead to further complications, possibly emergency surgeries, and reduce the patient’s chance of survival. This is not to say that hospitals made the wrong call in prioritising COVID-19 patients, but to point out that while the pandemic might be battering the country in wave after deadly wave, the country’s disease burden isn’t going anywhere. Elective procedures also include those that are not necessarily linked to a disease— like cosmetic proce- dures. In 2019, India was the country with the 9th highest number of aesthetic procedures done, according to the global survey of the International Association of Aesthetic Plastic Surgery. With studies showing that body image issues are on the rise during the pandemic, it can be expected that the demand for aesthetic plastic surgery and other cosmetic procedures will increase. The burden on the healthcare system will not be easing with the reduction of COVID-19 cases. Hospitals will have to spend months, if not years, catching up with the backlog of elective surgeries— in just the early months of lockdown, 5.8 lakh surgeries had to be postponed or cancelled. However, figures from December 2020 after the first wave of the pandemic show surgeries reaching 80% of pre-covid levels, and if the same trend is to repeat this year post-second wave, it can be said that hospitals are,
10 Jan 2022
Shruti Menon
