Introduction
Pathology reports are a crucial medical document that contains critical information about diagnosis, prognosis, and treatment. Although all pathology reports contain important information, some of them contain critical information about life-threatening changes that need immediate treatment.1 These diagnoses are considered panic diagnoses in surgical pathology.2 Failure to follow up on the results of these reports or lack of appropriate communication of these reports results may lead to a delay in diagnosis that may cause severe or irreparable harm and may affect the patient outcome.3 To ensure patient safety and prevent this delay, national pathology societies recommend that each pathology department should identify potential panic (unexpected) diagnosis lists and draw up a communication policy.2
The College of American Pathologists (CAP) evaluates panic (unexpected) diagnoses under Urgent Diagnoses and Significant, Unexpected Diagnoses titles. CAP defines urgent diagnoses as an important or life-threatening medical condition that requires urgent intervention and recommends that direct verbal communication occurs on the day of diagnosis. They also define Significant, Unexpected Diagnoses as a clinically unusual or unpredictable medical condition that needs to be addressed at some point in the patient’s course and recommends that communication occurs as soon as possible.2 The Federation of Turkish pathology society considers Urgent, Significant, and unexpected diagnoses under a single title as a panic diagnosis.
Several studies indicated that immediately effective verbal communication had a beneficial impact on patient’s outcome and treatment management.4,5 Although communication between the clinician and the pathologist is established in a brief time, in some cases, reaching the patient may take longer. In the case of patients with an unexpected malignancy, prolonged hospital admission time may result in delayed treatment and worsening of prognosis.
The severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus-2 (SARS-CoV-2) that causes coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19), first appeared in Wuhan (China) and the COVID-19 pandemic spread rapidly around the world.6-8 The first case in Turkey was recorded on 11 March and following this many hospitals have been turned into the COVID-19 pandemic hospitals and elective surgical procedures and non-critical health care services are limited. The lockdown has also made it difficult for patients to access healthcare services for non- COVID-19 conditions in addition to healthcare limitations. Many studies revealed that hospital admission for acute medical illnesses, including stroke and acute myocardial infarction, fell dramatically with the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic.9-11
In this study, we aimed to determine the duration of hospital admission of the patients with panic diagnosis pre-COVID-19 and during the COVID-19 pandemic, to examine the factors that may influence hospital admission time, and to identify the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on hospital admission time.