The global pandemic of COVID-19 caused by coronavirus has had a profound
impact on the delivery of health care in the United States and globally.
Boston was among the earliest hit cities in the United States, and
within Boston, the Massachusetts General Hospital provided care for more
patients with COVID -19 than any other hospital in the region. This
necessitated a massive re-allocation of resources and priorities, with
near doubling of intensive care bed capacity and a halt in all
deferrable surgical cases. During this crisis, the Division of Cardiac
Surgery responded in a unified manner, dealing honestly with the
necessity to reduce Intensive Care Unit resource utilization, for the
benefit of both the institution and our community, by deferring
non-emergent cases while also continuing to efficiently care for those
patients in urgent or emergent need of surgery. Many of the
interventions that we instituted have continued to support teamwork as
we adapt to the remarkably fluid changes in resource availability during
the recovery phase. We believe that the culture of our division and the
structure of our practice facilitated our ability to contribute to the
mission of our hospital to support the community in this crisis, and now
to its recovery. We describe here the challenge we faced in Boston and
some of the details of the structure and function of our division.