With COVID-19 rapidly expanding globally and placing a huge burden on healthcare systems worldwide, evidence is needed urgently to inform the management of surgical patients displaying symptoms. Capturing real-world data and sharing international experience will support the management of this complex group of patients with the aim to improve their clinical care.

CovidSurg is an international network of frontline surgeons and anaesthetists collaborating to rapidly deliver studies on COVID-19 in the surgical setting. In under a week from the launch of CovidSurg, over 1,700 clinicians representing >800 hospitals across 98 countries registered to participate.

More information is available from our website.

CovidSurg provides a global platform to rapidly develop, set-up, and deliver a series of high-impact studies. The following studies have been launched with more to follow.

The CovidSurg cohort study is an observational study which captures data from patients who undergo surgery and have been tested positive for COVID-19 or display all relevant clinical symptoms. Centres can choose to include only children, only adults, or both children and adults.

Up-to-date study documentation is available at any time from here.

Cancer-CovidSurg was designed in response to feedback from collaborators. It is running in parallel to the CovidSurg cohort study using the same platform. Cancer-CovidSurg will determine (i) the frequency of hospital-acquired COVID-19 infection in elective surgery; (ii) the impact of COVID-19 infection on patient outcomes; (iii) delays to elective cancer surgery caused by the pandemic and consequent impact on oncological outcomes. Participating centres will be able to choose to collect data on one or more of the following patient groups: breast cancer, colorectal cancer, and gastric cancer.

More information is available here.

Regular surveys are sent to the CovidSurg network in order to collect data to inform rapid modelling studies which can support surgical policy and practice as the pandemic evolves. The first survey measures the impact of COVID-19 on cancellations of elective surgery enabling per-country global estimates of cancelled operations to be produced, directly feeding into health service planning. Future surveys will track the impact of COVID-19 on patients, hospitals, and healthcare staff.

The CovidSurg Collaborative published ‘Global guidance for surgical care during the COVID-19 pandemic’ providing direction on how to deliver surgical services safely and effectively during the pandemic. This paper, published in BJS, aims to identify the key domains that should be considered when developing pandemic preparedness plans for surgical services. The full paper is available here .