Evolving consensus on managing vitreo-retina and uvea practice in post-COVID-19 pandemic era
Vishali Gupta, Anand Rajendran, Raja Narayanan, Shobhit Chawla, Atul Kumar, M. Palanivelu, NS Muralidhar, Chaitra Jayadev, Rajeev Reddy Pappuru, Manoj Khatri, Manisha Agarwal, Ajay Aurora, Pramod Bhende, Muna Bhende, Prashant Bawankule, Pukhraj Rishi, Anand Vinekar, HemantSingh Trehan, Jyotirmay Biswas, Rupesh Agarwal, S Natarajan, Lalit Verma, Kim Ramasamy, A Giridhar, Ekta Rishi, Dinesh Talwar, Avinash Pathangey, Rajvardhan Azad, Santosh G Honavar
Abstract
The COVID-19 pandemic has brought new challenges to the health care community. Many of the super-speciality practices are planning to re-open after the lockdown is lifted. However there is lot of apprehension in everyone's mind about conforming practices that would safeguard the patients, ophthalmologists, healthcare workers as well as taking adequate care of the equipment to minimize the damage. The aim of this article is to develop preferred practice patterns, by developing a consensus amongst the lead experts, that would help the institutes as well as individual vitreo-retina and uveitis experts to restart their practices with confidence. As the situation remains volatile, we would like to mention that these suggestions are evolving and likely to change as our understanding and experience gets better. Further, the suggestions are for routine patients as COVID-19 positive patients may be managed in designated hospitals as per local protocols. Also these suggestions have to be implemented keeping in compliance with local rules and regulations.