Impact of COVID-19 on Society of Urologic Oncology fellowship operative volumes

PURPOSE: The COVID-19 pandemic impacted all aspects of healthcare including surgical training. Our objective was to assess the impact of the pandemic on surgical case volumes of graduating Society of Urologic Oncology (SUO) fellows during the academic years 2019 to 2020 and 2020 to 2021. MATERIALS AND METHODS: Deidentified case logs for graduating SUO fellows from 2017 to 2021 were obtained from the SUO Education Committee. Cases are stratified by category and minimally invasive surgery (MIS) or open approach. Graduates of 2017, 2018, and 2019 were combined into a pre-COVID cohort and compared to COVID-affected 2020 and 2021 cohorts. Total case volumes, case category volumes, and surgical approach type were compared with Kruskal-Wallis test. RESULTS: A total of 173 graduating SUO fellow case logs were analyzed with 100, 38, and 35 in the pre-COVID and COVID-affected 2020 and 2021 cohorts, respectively. All fellow logs were obtained for 2017 to 2020 graduates while 5 of 40 were missing for the 2021 cohort. There was no statistical difference in median total cases across cohorts (P = 0.52). For the first COVID-affected cohort of 2020, they reported significantly fewer total MIS cases in 2020 compared to pre-COVID fellows (median 92.5 vs. 135 pre-COVID, P = 0.002). However, there were no significant differences among the tracked oncologic MIS categories except a statistically significant increase in MIS retroperitoneal lymph node dissection between 2020 and 2021 COVID-affected cohorts (0 vs. 2, P = 0.033) CONCLUSIONS: The oncologic case volumes of the initial SUO fellows graduating during COVID pandemic were minimally affected. This national deidentified data is reassuring that oncologic training has not been impacted by widespread decreases in case volume. However, impacts on individuals, programs or geographic regions may have varied.