The effect of the CoVID-19 pandemic in intestinal rehabilitation and transplant patients: Initial results of the intestinal rehabilitation and transplant association’s international survey

Abstract

The World Health Organization declared the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) outbreak as a global public health emergency on January 30, 2020, and as a pandemic on March 11th of the same year. Worldwide, health systems had to rapidly adapt and change their practices to prioritize the care provided, favoring COVID-19–infected patients and emergent cases, including transplants.1-9Patients with intestinal failure (IF) have unique pathophysiology and require care with frequent home visits from their parenteral nutrition (PN) teams, whereas intestine transplant (IT) patients are highly immunosuppressed. Therefore, both groups are considered highly susceptible to COVID-19.During the pandemic, multidisciplinary IF teams had to adapt their clinical approaches to protect this vulnerable group of patients by reducing the number of visits, implementing telemedicine, and carefully evaluating the impact of increasing home self-care, reducing the number of visits of nurses or PN suppliers, and by modifying the posttransplant follow-up protocols, including surveillance biopsies. Among all the published articles and specifically when looking into surveys that pertain to the transplant community, no specific data are available to understand theimpact of the disease on the IT population. Therefore, we developed a step-up survey approachaiming to describe the impact of the COVID-19 disease on patients treated by IF and IT units worldwide.