Nica Raluca-Elena, Camen Georgiana-Cristiana, Şerbănescu Mircea-Sebastian, Florescu Lucian-Mihai, Gheonea Ioana-Andreea
PhD Student, Doctoral School, University of Medicine and Pharmacy of Craiova, Romania.
Department of Radiology and Medical Imaging, Emergency Clinical County Hospital of Craiova, Romania.
Curr Health Sci J. 2021 Oct-Dec;47(4):494-500. doi: 10.12865/CHSJ.47.04.03. Epub 2021 Dec 31.
The COVID-19 pandemic has disrupted medical care systems, by decreasing patient addressability to outpatient care. The main objective of this study was to compare the patient's addressability to breast imaging techniques for diagnosis, and follow-up in the Clinical Emergency County Hospital of Craiova, Romania. We selected the mammographies performed over a period of 4 years (2018-2021) in our clinic. We divided the patients into four groups, one for each year (2018, 2019, 2020, 2021). Furtherly, we merged the data into two groups, one group for the pre-pandemic years (2018 and 2019) and one for the pandemic years (2020 and 2021). In our clinic, the number of mammographies plummeted to 0 during the month of April 2020 due to the lockdown and closure of non-urgent outpatient services in hospitals treating COVID-19 patients, and slowly creeped to 11 in the month of May and peaked to 160 in July (for the rest of the year). There was a huge difference regarding the patient's addressability to mammography immediately after the lockdown, with a 95.2% less addressability compared to the pre-pandemic period (May 2020 compared to May 2018). As an overall, by comparing both pre-pandemic years included in the study with the pandemic years, we obtained an addressability reduced with 37.3% suggesting the possible future delays in diagnosing breast tumors.
新冠疫情扰乱了医疗系统，降低了患者获得门诊护理的可及性。本研究的主要目的是比较罗马尼亚克拉约瓦市临床急诊县医院患者在诊断及随访中接受乳腺成像技术检查的可及性。我们选取了本诊所4年（2018 - 2021年）期间进行的乳腺钼靶检查。我们将患者分为四组，每年一组（2018年、2019年、2020年、2021年）。此外，我们将数据合并为两组，一组为疫情前年份（2018年和2019年），另一组为疫情年份（2020年和2021年）。在我们诊所，由于新冠疫情患者收治医院的封锁及非紧急门诊服务的关闭，2020年4月乳腺钼靶检查数量骤降至0，5月缓慢增至11例，7月达到峰值160例（当年其余时间）。封锁后患者接受乳腺钼靶检查的可及性有巨大差异，与疫情前时期相比可及性降低了95.2%（2020年5月与2018年5月相比）。总体而言，通过比较研究中纳入的疫情前年份与疫情年份，我们发现可及性降低了37.3%，这表明未来乳腺肿瘤诊断可能会出现延迟。
