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Background The dissemination of scientific data on coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) continually builds but, in April 2020, could not keep up with the spread of the disease. Through technology, surgeons in Italy and the UK, representing both peak and pre-peak infective time zones, were able to communicate so that the urgent lessons on the huge expected demands of care learned in Italy could be brought to the UK in advance. This paper specifically discusses the issues related to paediatric surgery, currently under-reported in the literature. Methods The aim of this paper is to conjoin experience from the field to provide a framework for a safe assessment and treatment of paediatric patients by adopting a systemic approach aimed at reducing the risk of contamination. We reviewed the processes and good practices that were undertaken in contexts of emergency such as in Italy and the UK and then adapted them within the Systems Engineering Initiative for Patient Safety (SEIPS) framework to provide an assessment of how to reorganize the services in order to cope with an unexpected situation. The SEIPS model is the adopted theoretical framework, which allows to analyse the system in its main components with a human factors and ergonomics (HFE) perspective. Results The results introduce some of the good practices and recommendations developed during the emergency in the surgical scenario with a focus on the paediatric patients. They represent the lessons learned from the combination of the little existing evidence of literature and the experience from surgical teams who responded in an impromptu and unrehearsed way. Conclusions Lessons learned from the frontline 'on the fly' during COVID-19 emergency should be consolidated and taken into the future. In order to prepare proactively for the next phases and get ahead of the curve of these hospital accesses, there is a need for a risk assessment of the new clinical pathways with a multidisciplinary approach centred on HFE with the adoption of the SEIPS model and an involvement of all the surgical teams. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The author comments on a research paper on the prevalence, incidence and mortality of delirium in the COVID-19 disease, which references a study by S. C. Shao et al., published in a 2021 issue of "Age Ageing". Topics discussed include the characteristics of delirium, the challenges facing health professionals in managing delirium in patients with COVID-19, findings on its prevalence on admission and during hospitalization, and the study's implications for care for patients with delirium.