Impact of COVID-19 Pandemic on Hepatopancreatobiliary Surgical Services in Singapore

This paper is intended to report our observational study in evaluating the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on Tan Tock Seng Hospital hepatopancreatobiliary unit's surgical workload from January to June across 2019 to 2022, corresponding to the pre-pandemic baseline to its peak and the gradual normalization of hospital services as Singapore entered the transition phase to COVID-19 resilience.

This paper is intended to report our observational study in evaluating the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on Tan Tock Seng Hospital hepatopancreatobiliary unit's surgical workload from January to June across 2019 to 2022, corresponding to the pre-pandemic baseline to its peak and the gradual normalization of hospital services as Singapore entered the transition phase to COVID-19 resilience. A comparative audit of the unit's surgical workload for the months of January-June across 2019 to 2022, which corresponded to pre-COVID-19, the height of the pandemic, and a gradual normalization of surgical services. Operations performed by the unit were collected from the surgeons' electronic case logs. These operations were sorted based on the Singapore Ministry of Health's table of surgical procedures, which assigns charge codes to different procedures. The retrospective data across the 4 years were compared and analysed. No patient contact or identifiers were retrieved, stored or disseminated and thus exempt from ethics board review.