Abstract:

Aim: To evaluate the effect of the Covid-19 pandemic on urology practice using the pre and post-pandemic data of secondary and tertiary healthcare institutions. Material and Method: March 2020 was considered the beginning of the pandemic, and the timeframe until March 2021 was divided into three periods according to the restriction decisions. During this period, the number of patients admitted to the urology outpatient clinics, the number of patients consulted from the emergency department, the number of daily procedures and operations that performed were collected at both Aydın State Hospital (ADH) and Süleyman Demirel University Research and Application Hospital (SDU-AUH), retrospectively. The collected data were first compared with the same three periods of the previous year, than between two hospitals. Results: While there was a decrease in the number of outpatient clinic patients during the pandemic process in both hospitals, this decrease was more evident in the pandemic's first period (p<0.05). The mean numbers of daily procedures were caught up with the previous year' in the second and third periods of the pandemic in SDU-AUH (p>0.05). No significant change was observed in the number of oncological surgical procedures in SDU-AUH (p>0.05). The decrease in the mean number of stone surgery was more prominent in ADH (p <0.05). Conclusion: The negative effects of the Covid-19 pandemic continue in the world and our country. The health sector's workload has increased with the transformation of many hospitals across the country into pandemic hospitals. We demonstrated how the increasing workload impacts the two hospitals providing at different healthcare levels.

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