My day begins at 5:45 a.m. sharp when I walk from pre-op to PACU to check on everything from medical gases to medications. Here’s the mental checklist I complete...

If your patient drinks all her prep the night before her colonoscopy screening, her colon will be fully cleaned out when she goes to bed. But the digestive system never sleeps....

Will your infection prevention practices pass inspection with accreditors and state health departments? Keep your facility in compliance by downloading this free checklist...

How can you expect your recovery room nurses to be on the lookout for pressure injuries when they don’t know what position the patient was in during surgery? A simple...

Our blood glucose logs include key reminders for our staff. • Check expiration dates. Each day we test a patient, we must test the blood sugar monitor to ensure the strips and solutions have not expired. A box of test strips

It's frustrating, not to mention a waste of valuable time, when central sterile returns incomplete or incorrect instrument sets to the OR. We snapped overhead cellphone pictures...

Wrong-site blocks represent nearly one-fourth of all wrong-site procedures, yet we hear precious little about nerve block safety. Block site marks aren’t always visible,...

It’s critical to stay up to date on the latest clinical research, but how do you find the time? Start a weekly journal club. Every Thursday for our adult reconstruction service,...

I never need an excuse to have fun with my incredible surgical team. We celebrate birthdays, babies and big-time staff achievements. We even turned our employee engagement...

There are so many ways to communicate with staff — emails, phone calls, text messages, snail mail, intercoms, breakroom bulletin boards, you name it — yet none of those...

Rather than handing patients a single-use plastic bag to store their belongings, we now give them a reusable blue plastic storage bucket. We have plenty of the 2-feet wide by 4-inches high buckets,...

In an effort to reduce the infection rate among our colon resection patients, we took some advice from our GYN/ONCO surgeons on closing protocol. They had started the practice of changing gowns,...

To help reduce injuries, we decided that our nurses didn't have to do all the heavy lifting. We instituted a safe patient handling and movement program that uses...

It's no great secret that injecting a small amount of 1% lidocaine under the skin just before the venipuncture will make IV starts a painless breeze for both patients and nurses,...

Of the many ways to reuse blue sterilization wrap, here's one you might not have considered: sew a couple sheets together to make a sleeping mat for homeless people...

I didn't think much about the slip-resistant socks we used to throw away after patients were done with them — until, that is, I underwent surgery myself at our hospital. It struck me...

Ideas That Work: Pull, Aim, Squeeze and Sweep; Can Your Staff Use A Fire Extinguisher?

Ideas That Work: Skin Care; Adhesive Removal: Go Low and Slow

Ideas That Work: Puppet Show; Toby the Puppy Greets Pediatric Patients

Ideas That Work: First-Name Basis; Embroidered Scrub Caps Make Close-Knit Teams