Catching the Wave: Quantifying the Impact of COVID on Radiotherapy Delivery

The novel coronavirus of 2019 has had a broad impact of the delivery of healthcare, including cancer care. We chose to quantify the impact in the radiation oncology department of the largest academic center in the hardest hit city in Canada. With the approval of our ethics review board, data on each patient treated from March 13, 2020 to August 10, 2020 were compared to patients treated during the same period in 2019. We compared the case mix, delay from treatment decision to treatment start, and number of fractions per patient. We reviewed prospectively collected information regarding deviations from our usual practice. During the pandemic the caseload was reduced by 12%; this was more pronounced in prostate and CNS tumors. The average number of fractions per patient was reduced from 12.3 to 10.9. This reduction was most marked in prostate, breast, gastro-intestinal, and palliative cases. When physicians were questioned, they reported that 17% of treatment plans deviated from their usual practice because of the pandemic. The most common deviations were related to changes in department policies (77%) vs. patient-specific deviations (20%) or changes requested by the patient (3%). Rare deviations were due to patients contracting COVID-19 (2 patients). At its worse, the wait list contained 27% of patients who had a delay to radiotherapy of more than 28 days. However, the average wait time increased little (19.6 days vs. 18.2 days) as more pressing cases were prioritized. In an unprecedented health crisis, our radiation oncology department was able to reduce resource utilization, notably by decreasing the number of fractions per patient. It will be important to follow these patients’ health outcomes for insight into these practices. More quantitative tools to simulate and plan future practice changes in response to resource constraints will be implemented.