ABSTRACT
BACKGROUND: Healthcare workers are still the front liners in health care services, and have major roles during the COVID-19 pandemic. In a resource-limited country like Indonesia, it is necessary to provide safe screening and management both for patients and healthcare workers to minimize the transmission. We report our experience in the cardiac surgery department on how to provide safe management during the COVID-19 pandemic. METHODS: A retrospective observational study was performed in a single-tertiary-center cardiac surgery department in Surabaya and included all patients who underwent cardiac surgery during the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic. We also collected the patients from a 1-year period before the pandemic as the comparison data. Analysis of the patient characteristics, operative data, and postoperative outcome, was performed. This study also provides our experience in changes of admission in the cardiac surgery preoperative system that can be utilized for others. RESULTS: A total of 179 patients were admitted to and had cardiac surgery. Of these, 3.80% (n = 7) were COVID-19 confirmed by a real-time polymerase chain reaction. Five patients were delayed to have cardiac surgery with no mortality or morbidity reported in these patients. During the period after changes of admission procedural in cardiac surgery patients, there were no healthcare workers infected by COVID-19 by patient transmission in our center (0%). CONCLUSION: Our study reported a systematic screening and that possible delay in cardiac surgery appears to be feasible and safe, both for patients and for healthcare workers during the COVID-19 pandemic.