The care for all patients with cancer requires multidisciplinary review and decision-making, and entails the consideration of many factors in order to develop a sound plan of treatment. This requires a detailed assessment of patient, disease, surgical team, and hospital resources. These principles remain critical and in fact, arguably more important now as we combat the COVID-19 pandemic than ever before. Thus a

“one size fits all” recommendation would be unwise due to significant variability in patient presentation, individual comorbidities, disease severity, regional pandemic burden, and hospital-regional resources. This paper published by SAGES and AHPBA presents general recommendations. These are meant to be helpful to the surgeon while recognizing that the individual surgeon and patient will need to decide upon the course of therapy depending on local resources and individual situations.

The recommendations below are aimed to help guide practicing surgeons by providing a framework to address more urgent cancer cases, and to help stratify options that may diminish risk and improve outcomes. To address these concerns, we refer to several resources including the Elective Surgery Acuity Scale (ESAS) as published by the American College of Surgeons (ACS).