Some of the drugs and fluids used most often in surgical facilities go in and out of shortage daily due to interruptions in the supply chain, a problem exacerbated by the...

The Secret to Safer Surgery; Capturing real-time data during procedures leads to enhanced patient care

You authored the world's bestselling primer Understanding Patient Safety. What's the single most important component of keeping patients safe?...

Keeping surgical patients warm and their core body temperature above 36 ?C is not only critical to their comfort, but also their safety. Unplanned perioperative hypothermia...

If you think residents of nursing homes are the only people who wind up with agonizing pressure injuries because they've been laying in the same position for weeks...

Years ago, Valerie Y. Marsh, BSN, MSN, DNP, CNOR, was sure a sponge had been left inside a patient. "The surgeon swore it wasn't in there, and he wasn't going to reopen...

You never know how your staff will respond to a rare but potentially deadly malignant hyperthermia (MH) event until it actually occurs. When we found ourselves facing...

Wrong-site surgeries occur approximately 40 times a week in facilities across the U.S. Surgical professionals must therefore ask themselves why these avoidable errors...

For the longest time, we believed safer equipment and safety procedures were the way to prevent sharps injuries. But after years of increased focus on sharps safety, this hasn't been...

Putting patients in steep Trendelenburg is arguably one of the most challenging positioning tasks your OR staff faces. With the number of robotic urologic and...

MYTH #1: A post-op fever is indicative of MH FACT: Many clinicians worry that MH may begin in the postoperative period with a fever...

Inadvertent perioperative hypothermia is a preventable complication that can have disastrous consequences. A patient whose temperature dips below 36 C will react to...

When the Joint Commission looked at the most commonly reported sentinel events from ambulatory care organizations in 2018 and the first half of 2019, wrong-site...

CMS Issues Updated Reopening Recommendations; The guidance aims to ensure elective surgeries continue to resume safely

The patient came in for a cystoscopy, a common outpatient procedure that only requires a person to be on the table for about 25 minutes. But the procedure does...

At the heart of electrosurgery safety is a firm understanding of how the technology works and the core principles driving its use. A base knowledge of the physics behind...

Counts Aren't Always Correct; Barcode scanning and RFID detection help to make sure no sponge is left behind.

It's not that difficult to learn from your mistakes. All it takes is gathering your nurses and surgical techs for a half-hour meeting every few months to talk about errors...

How Do You Enhance Patient Safety? Readers reveal the solutions they use to augment the efforts of their protective-minded surgical teams.

Positioned for Change; Reviewing and revamping your positioning protocols will protect patients from harm and give surgeons the access they need to perform successful surgery.