Guidance for Providing Primary Care During the COVID-19 Pandemic
A living document of outpatient guidelines, crowdsourced by family physicians on the front lines
April 4, 2020 — Family physicians at a large academic medical center in one of the hardest hit states in the United States have developed a “living document” that provides guidelines for outpatient COVID-19 care. The guidelines provide workflows for drive-thru COVID-19, outpatient respiratory care evaluation, COVID-19 testing criteria, considerations for pregnant, pediatrics and other special populations, and specific guidelines for providing primary care during the COVID-19 pandemic. Access the Department of Family Medicine COVID-19 Guidelines here.
The introduction to the document reads:
The most important piece of information we must convey is that given the rate of community transmission we are seeing around the world, the best guidance we can give is to strive to practice social distancing and universal precautions as much as possible.
We understand that each person’s living and working environments will pose unique challenges to implementing this. Once one is infected, there is no proven treatment at this time. Therefore, exercising preventative measures now, while they may seem burdensome and unreasonable, is truly the only effective treatment we have to combat this dangerous illness.
Collaborators on the document include Jill Fenske MD, Jenna B. Greenberg MD, Elizabeth K. Jones MD, Nell Burger Kirst MD, Feranmi Okanlami MD, MS, Daniel S. Oram MD, and Jacob Wasag MD.
