TABLE 2.
Focus Group Excerpts: Teamwork
| Domain | Excerpts |
|---|---|
| Interdisciplinary teams | “I think the interdisciplinary work has been improving …I think the main characters in the decision making for [COVID] patients, especially in the infectious disease department, pulmonology, and ICU…all of that was improved in order to optimize the resources and the patient care… they were always open to debate or discuss about certain cases, especially oncology patients.” (Mexico) |
| “I think that in a context like this obviously the interaction with all the specialties has increased… In our service, for example, we have much more interaction with the infectious diseases service, we hold more meetings with surgery, I think this is something that this pandemic implies.” (Spain) | |
| “We were all pretty nervous at first and so we texted each other constantly. It was like we had this group chat going on 24 hours a day for probably the first couple of weeks because we were all like really nervous. And we shared every bit of information and discussed every article that came out and we were kind of all over it.” (United States) | |
| “I think I will have to say that for pediatric oncology I think we are working better because all the multidisciplinary team meetings are in via Zoom, so the attendance has improved like 100%.” (Philippines) | |
| “One thing that the pandemic has brought us and that I like very much is that we now do a multidisciplinary work. We all get together and we share our opinions debating how we can do things. We're now united, we have reached unity… We've learned to be united to achieve a common goal. Not everything in the pandemic is bad, we've achieved unity.” (Peru) | |
| “It makes a huge difference when you look right, and you look left and everyone has got their sleeves rolled up and are doing the work and I think that makes a huge difference and that's a testament to everyone that we work with. There was no one that shied away from work or used this as an excuse to do less work or to stay at home or to not come to work or –yeah I thought everyone from that point of view, it was‐‐ yeah it's been great.” (South Africa) | |
| “The support and encouragement of each other, because when a person gets tired and they have no more enthusiasm, it's easy to give up and say, “I can't do this anymore.” But when you see a colleague, who try in some sense to share the work, and help each other, then you get extra strength. Well, we of course try to encourage each other, in the sense of oversight of each other, and gave advice to each other, helped each other, because we all have families and other people we come in contact with, so we try to give advice to each other, when we are exhausted, or when there is something in the throat, then we talk and seek advice with each other about what to do, and that's how we support each other.” (Belarus) | |
| External collaborations | “Thankfully we all [oncologists and NGOs] coordinated together…to get the children into the hospital and make sure they all…are being taken care of and the treatment is being provided.” (India) |
| “We had a collaboration group of several oncologists…some came to us to share the experience, not only here in Brazil but we received several emails from people outside of Brazil asking how to treat, since we had many cases of oncology (patients) with positive (COVID tests).” (Brazil) | |
| “We have relied heavily on other centers that are credited to do the SARS‐CoV‐2 testing… But also, the reverse is that we have been supporting the COVID treatment unit with laboratory testing for the critical laboratory diagnostics.” (Uganda) | |
| “Patients that are COVID positive who we could not accommodate were sent to [another institution]. This is because of the understanding that we had developed with them. This helped us a lot also. That that we could send patients to institute that we knew would take care of them.” (Pakistan) |
Abbreviations: COVID, coronavirus disease; ICU, intensive care unit; NGO, nongovernmental organization; SARS‐CoV‐2, severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 virus.