May 15, 2020
Dear Colleagues:
In an effort to rapidly produce guidance for the health care community, a consortium of experts from The American Society of Breast Surgeons (ASBrS), the National Accreditation Program for Breast Centers (NAPBC), the National Comprehensive Cancer Network (NCCN), the Commission on Cancer (CoC) and the American College of Radiology® (ACR®) joined forces to produce an Executive Summary and then an Editorial to help busy clinicians navigate through difficult decisions during the COVID-19 pandemic.
We created a follow up document (pdf) to help guide the health care community through the recovery stage of the pandemic, recognizing that different hospitals and cancer centers would be in different phases of the pandemic and recovery. We were delighted to have experts from the American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO) and the Society of Surgical Oncology (SSO) join the consortium. This document is a combination of peer reviewed literature as well as expert opinion when good data was not available. Since breast cancer is a multidisciplinary disease, we felt the best way to present this was in a multidisciplinary conference fashion. For some of the scenarios, one or another of the disciplines is more prominent.
Please feel free to use and to distribute this document. We welcome your feedback.
Jill R. Dietz, MD
President
On Behalf of the ASBrS Board of Directors
