Hospital study tracks an uneven recovery in surgical volume after COVID-19 disruption

A new study from IO Lab, published in JAMA Network Open, found that surgical activity at Massachusetts General Hospital recovered unevenly after the first wave of COVID-19. Overall volume remained below its prepandemic baseline during 2021. The study traced how a major hospital’s response to the pandemic affected the pattern of operations across specialties and levels of urgency.

Soham Ghoshal and colleagues reviewed surgical records from January 2019 through December 2021. Their retrospective analysis compared activity before the pandemic with successive periods of disruption and recovery. The investigators also examined how institutional policies and surgical acuity related to changes in volume.

Weekly procedures fell by 44.6% at the spring 2020 peak, from 732 to 406. During the recovery period later in 2020, volume reached 85.8% of baseline. In the period following vaccine release in 2021, it reached 92.9%. Recovery differed by specialty, with several services continuing to operate below their earlier volume.

The results show how an overall hospital figure can obscure differences among clinical services. Staff, operating rooms and inpatient beds serve patients with different needs, and those resources may face changing pressures during a public health emergency. Tracking the recovery of individual specialties can help planners identify where capacity deserves a closer review. Procedure counts provide one part of that assessment.

The analysis cannot establish how delays affected an individual patient’s health. It measured surgical activity at one institution and did not directly quantify the number of patients waiting for an operation. A return toward previous volume also leaves unanswered whether a hospital has addressed care deferred during earlier months. Understanding that question requires information about waiting lists, clinical urgency and patient outcomes.

The period labeled postvaccination describes when procedures occurred. The observational design cannot isolate vaccination as the cause of changes in surgical activity. Local policies, staffing, infection rates and other circumstances could also influence the recovery. Findings from a large academic hospital may differ from those in smaller institutions or other regions.

For hospital operations, the study supports following recovery over time and separating results by specialty and acuity. That approach can guide more detailed assessments of unmet need. It also offers a record of how surgical services responded to prolonged disruption, which can inform planning for future emergencies.