Management of Dysphagia in Head and Neck Cancer Patient during COVID-19 Pandemic: Practica

Peter KM Ku from United Christian Hospital authored clinical practice guidelines for managing dysphagia in head and neck cancer patients during the COVID-19 pandemic. The document provides a practical workflow to balance SARS-CoV-2 exposure risks with dysphagia risks, focusing on modified assessment and care pathways. It is published as Open Access material on the paperswithcode platform.

Use Cases

• Developing triage protocols for swallowing assessments based on the guideline to reserve instrumental evaluations for urgent cases only.
• Designing telehealth frameworks for dysphagia management based on recommendations for optimizing non-instrumental evaluations and remote care.
• Creating training modules for healthcare personnel on PPE use and safe practice modifications during aerosol-generating procedures.
• Benchmarking local clinical service adaptations against the published guidelines to ensure safe and reasonable care pathways.

Strengths

• Authored by a clinician from a specific hospital (United Christian Hospital), providing practical clinical expertise.
• Focuses on a specific, high-need patient population (head and neck cancer patients with dysphagia) during a defined global event (COVID-19 pandemic).
• Provides concrete, actionable recommendations such as reserving instrumental assessments and using telehealth.

Limitations

• Description metadata is limited; actual data quality requires manual inspection after download.
• Column-level documentation is absent; field semantics must be inferred after download.
• Row count is unknown, which may limit suitability assessment.

Provenance

Source

Peter KM Ku, United Christian Hospital

Collection Method

Clinical practice guidelines based on available evidence.

Time Range

Covers the period of the COVID-19 pandemic.