The COVID-19 pandemic has certainly changed our world in ways that were not previously imaginable in modern times. UCSF has rapidly and courageously adapted to concentrate our attention on the pandemic while also continuing to care for all the complex medical needs of our community in California.
In order to accomplish this, a number of ear, nose, and throat related services that you have come to depend upon are not functioning in the way that we normally conduct care. Specifically, our teams have been deployed to cover all of our functional sites and have done so in a way that protects the physician and allied personnel so that if one member of our care team is exposed to viral infection, we will still be able to provide ENT care at that site. Yet, we are still active at all of our care facilities. Mt. Zion ENT ambulatory practices including audiology ( /patient-care/hearing-and-balance) and speech and language pathology (/patient-care/airway-voice-and-swallowing) are still able to care for patients either via Telemedicine or if necessary in person. We are still taking care of all of our patients with recent surgery who need to be seen in person. Our Helen Diller Family Comprehensive Cancer Center Head and Neck Oncology and Head and Neck Endocrine Surgery Practice at Mission Bay is still seeing patients who require cancer and tumor treatment and reconstruction (/patient-care/cancers-and-tumors). Our teams have been deployed to UCSF Parnassus, UCSF Benioff Children’s Hospital, San Francisco and UCSF Benioff Children’s Hospital, Oakland (/patient-care/pediatric-ear-nose-and-throat), Zuckerberg San Francisco General, and the San Francisco VA Medical Center.
We strive to provide dependable consultation and to continue to take care of your urgent and necessary medical needs. We intend to accomplish Telemedicine visits when possible, and to augment screening and additional protective measures if an in-person visit is necessary. We want your care to be carried out safely and with confidence.
If you are a physician and need to refer a patient, please know that we will do our best to partner with you to provide the high quality care for which we are known.
If you are a patient and would like to be evaluated, please contact us through the patient care portal on this website (https://ohns.ucsf.edu/patient-care) and we will do our level best to help you with your health issues.
However, our best advice is to stay sheltered in place to the greatest extent possible.
Thank you,
Andrew H. Murr, MD, FACS
Professor and Chairman
Department of Otolaryngology-Head and Neck Surgery
University of California, San Francisco
School of Medicine
