Dear Colleagues,
In this time of COVID-19 outbreak, the Society for Anesthesia and Resuscitation of Belgium (SARB) would like to register the COVID-19 cases that are managed in the OR’s of Belgian Hospitals, including C-sections. For that purpose, we would like to ask you to fill in the following questionnaire (a downloadable version can be found at the following link), with as much information as available, paying attention to strictly respect patient anonymity. In order to link data to a particular patient anonymously, we ask you to attribute a reference number to each patient, using the following format: institution abbreviation followed by order number (e. g. first patient of CHR Citadelle Liege: chrliege1). Your personal data will also remain confidential, and the results will not be publicly available until this publication does not bypass official communication by hospitals. We will, however, need a contact person for each Institution participating into the study. This is the reason why we ask for a contact email address at the beginning of the survey. Should a publication emanate from the analysis of collected data, that contact person will be associated as a co-author of the publication.
Please note that the protocol of this multi-centric survey has been approved by the ‘Comité d’Ethique Hospitalo-Facultaire, Cliniques Saint Luc’, Brussels. The official approval can be found at the following link. Personal data protection and ethics require that we obtain consent from the patients to dispose of their data. Due to the current difficult circumstances of the outbreak, and the difficulty of obtaining written consent, oral consent by the patient has been exceptionally authorized by the Ethics Committee. A guide on how to inform the patients about this can be found at the following link, in Dutch and in French.
The collected data will be of great help to draw the picture of OR implications in such an outbreak situation, and will be meaningful only if a maximum of cases are reported. We thank you a lot for your help in achieving this in these troubled times, and remain at your disposal for any questions or concerns regarding this survey.
