COVID-19: Statement and Member Resources

ISAPS stands for patient safety and aesthetic education worldwide.

We have very carefully analyzed the worldwide recommendations of the WHO and also the CDC and other organizations and evaluated many recommendations and binding guidelines from different countries.

As an international society, we can only make general recommendations and cannot give advice for each individual country. Here, the respective national government is of course responsible and you have to follow their orders.  Nevertheless, we would like to recommend our members to follow the guidelines of the WHO and CDC and to restrict or cancel non-urgent selective operations and to reconsider non-urgent consultations or treatments.

Asymptomatic patients can infect and endanger staff and other patients. Non-urgent surgery consumes resources of all kinds that might be needed more urgently elsewhere.

However, please always base your decision on local conditions and the responsible authorities in your country.

We take our mission regarding further education very seriously and will serve you with considerably more webinars in the future, so that you can continue your education despite the many unusual courses and seminars.

In addition, we have set up a resource on our website and our information channels where you can access daily updated information that is important for you as a plastic surgeon and your patients

Register for Special COVID-19 Webinar Series

Thank you for your commitment to the patients’ safety and for your willingness to take sensitive measures.

Dirk F. Richter, MD – ISAPS President

Member Resources

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COVID-19: Recommendations for Management of Elective Surgical Procedures in Aesthetic Surgery

This document is a strategic guidance built on generic principles to be operationalized in specific country-system contexts, according to local, regional and/or national requirements and jurisdiction

It is very likely that the health care infrastructure and resources of most countries around the world will be strained over the coming weeks because of the dissemination of COVID-19 particularly as it relates to care of the most critically ill patients.

Social distancing, crowd avoidance, and other techniques do help to flatten the curve of the dissemination of COVID-19, but beyond that, it is appropriate to be forward thinking regarding those patients who will, nevertheless, become infected.

ISAPS has additional comments on this issue. Following a careful review of the current situation and given the current guidelines of the World Health Organization and Center of Disease Control and Prevention, we recommend the following:

  • Each hospital, health system, and plastic surgeon should thoughtfully review all scheduled elective procedures with a plan to minimize, postpone, or cancel electively scheduled operations or other invasive procedures until we have passed the predicted inflection point in the exposure graph and can be confident that our health care infrastructure can support a potentially rapid and overwhelming uptick in critical patient care needs.
  • Immediately minimize use of essential items needed to care for patients, including but not limited to, ICU beds, personal protective equipment, terminal cleaning supplies, and ventilators. There are many asymptomatic patients who are, nevertheless, shedding virus and are unwittingly exposing other inpatients, outpatients, and health care providers to the risk of contracting COVID-19.

Don’t put your elective patients at risk: An asymptomatic patient can turn into a complication patient through general anaesthesia, as we push the viruses into the lungs through ventilation. In addition, we weaken the immune system with every surgical procedure.

Every operation can cause complications that require hospitalisation and possibly intensive care, which is a scarce resource in corona times.

Keep in mind that every infusion, every ampoule of adrenaline you need for liposuction or an antibiotic that you give for prophylaxis in a breast augmentation might be needed for emergencies and is already in short supply on the world market and already no longer available in several countries.

Time is of the essence.  Please be vigilant and take a leadership role in your practice setting so that these recommendations begin to take hold immediately.

Sincerely,

Dirk F. Richter – ISAPS President

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