I’m feeling festive for the first time in forever. My Christmas tree went up the day after Halloween this year. That’s how excited I am for the holiday season. Granted, it’s an artificial one — not my standard farm-fresh six-footer...

After what we endured in 2020, you’d think it’d be easy to find more than a few reasons to be thankful this year. But some folks are having trouble letting go of the chronic-complaint, woe-is-me mindset that was so easy...

What does safe surgical care mean to you? Eliminating avoidable adverse events by developing and maintaining competent teams...

Every time we send out a staff engagement survey, we include the following question: Does your manager have a safety-first mindset? The question may seem out of place on an engagement survey,...

Rampant wildfires, historic flooding, destructive hurricanes and record-setting heat waves have made this year one for the record books. And while the weather outside is becoming increasingly erratic and impossible...

Orthopedics is a male-dominated field. What needs to be done to remedy that? This is a very big topic because we have to address the underlying causes of...

If you’re reading this, you’ve probably already seen the well-deserving winners of the 2021 OR Excellence Awards. Because the editors of this fine publication didn’t feel the need to solicit input from their backpage banterer...

You were a successful nurse anesthetist when you gained national attention from Dirty John, a podcast about your former husband John Meehan, disgraced CRNA, con man...

In the rapid-turnover, high-volume world of outpatient surgery, anesthesia professionals prepare for the worst but hope for the best. In a vast majority of cases,...

Outpatient surgery is often compared to aviation because both industries use checklists and crew resource management to avoid catastrophe. Airlines and surgery centers also rely on tight schedules to keep daily operations running,...

I just spent three weeks at a hospital giving out COVID-19 vaccines. Or at least trying to. The area where I worked was in a huge building with lots of space to accommodate crowds that didn't show. Fourteen vaccine administration...

I started working as a nurse in 1980. Not even three weeks into my training, I was learning how to assist a difficult-to-work-with surgeon during a challenging case. The process brought me to tears — literally. At one point,...

Complaining is as American as baseball (the games are too long!) and apple pie (the crust isn’t flaky enough!). Many of our problems simply aren’t that serious, but that doesn’t stop us from griping about, well,...

By now you’ve probably heard about the plastic surgeon who decided to make an appearance in traffic court on Zoom … during surgery! The YouTube clip of the hearing immediately went viral. Have you seen it?...

As you read this column, I will have been vaccinated against the dreaded virus we've been fighting for the past 12 months and started a new assignment as a travel nurse. I plan to retire at the end of the year, so this gig...

Everyone believes they have a general sense of "what" pain is. We've all stubbed our toes, slipped and fell, had horrible headaches or, worse still, stepped on Legos. Of course, this type of pain is incidental, unanticipated...

It's often obvious when you outgrow your current space. At one of my former hospitals, the surgical schedule extended way too late in the day, surgeons weren't happy, and patients and staff complained about delayed...

Long before we were in the grip of a global pandemic and surgical masks became fashion accessories, OR nurses were known to stash hard-to-come-by supplies such as gloves and gowns and, yes, N95s. Of course, COVID has...

Random. My 28-year-old daughter, Dani, called to say she'd lost her sense of taste and smell. She's a pediatric occupational therapist in South Carolina. Her colleague has the same symptoms and tested positive...

I've never been so happy to watch the ball drop on New Year's Eve. As soon as it touched down and ended the year we want to forget, I looked forward and focused on setting some self-care goals....