Impact of COVID-19 pandemic on general surgery training program: An Italian experience

[...]during the lock-down period, patients accessed to the ED with more advanced disease (e.g. perforated appendicitis, obstructing or bleeding colon cancers) and the procedure required in this case could rarely be performed by a senior resident. In some cases, the emergency surgery was performed on a COVID-19 patient. Since for such cases our hospital policy requires the involvement of as few staff as possible in order to minimize the contagion risk and prevent the waste of valuable PPE, residents of any specialty were not admitted to these procedures. For residents attending the final year of training, they detected a reduction from 84% to 44% (p < 0.001) of the minimally invasive procedure and from 82% to 46% (p = 0.002) of major surgery.2 The solution applied by Porpiglia et al. was to focus on constantly improving e-learning platforms and surgical simulation training programs.3 In Lombardy, Italy’s most hit region, surgical residents completely discontinued their usual duties to supply the lack of personnel in dedicated COVID-19 units.4 The problem of residents education was not just regional and confined to our National borders; the worldwide spread of COVID-19 infection affected all training programs all over the world.