The staff members who milled around the front desk of The Reading Hospital SurgiCenter at Spring Ridge were used to hearing one side of a familiar conversation....

Inside Our Pressure Injury Prevention Program; It's been 2 years and counting since a patient has suffered skin-related harm during surgery.

Leave Nothing Behind; Combining scanning technology with a meticulous manual count is your best defense against retained objects.

Sign the Right Correct Site; It takes plenty of planning and persistence to ensure surgeons always hit the mark.

How Safe Is Your Sterile Processing Department? Protect your reprocessing team from these 5 injury risks.

Operate Where Everybody Knows Your Name; Q&A with Robert Hackett, MD, anesthesiologist and inspiration of the #TheatreCapChallenge.

Patient Warming Pitfalls to Avoid; One of surgery's most basic patient safety practices is riskier than you might think.

Are You Ready to Manage MH? Good planning and plenty of practice will help you stay calm, cool and collected when stress levels rise.

Flexible endoscopes are notoriously difficult to clean, putting unsuspecting patients at risk of being exposed to infections by unsuspecting physicians. After a serious flexible...

It costs the Graystone Eye Surgery Center in Hickory, N.C., $1.05 to warm a patient. A loaner linen service charges $1 to clean a blanket, and the cost of using the...

Roughly 70% of retained surgical items are sponges, and roughly 80% of retained sponges occur with what staff believe is a correct count. No wonder OR managers...

We're all probably a little numb to medication safety. We get it. It's super important. We live the life. It's easy to become complacent until we have a problem....

Kids like to drive electric cars to the OR. Older patients prefer the quiet ride of a motorized stretcher chair that transforms from seat to transport stretcher to OR...

If you don't ask your patients if they smoke weed, you might want to start. As more states legalize both medicinal (33 states and D.C.) and recreational (10 states and D.C.)...

It's no secret that a stapler failure can quickly turn a routine procedure into an emergency. What's surprising is the alarming number of times staplers have misfired...

When it comes to retained surgical items (RSI), you shouldn't assume anything, you should prove it. And if you don't see it, you should find it. Working in surgery,...

Your surgeons might have the greatest training, the most accurate technique and work with cutting-edge equipment, but they can’t fix what they can’t see. Lighted...

The next time you need a lesson in radiation safety, pop your head into a procedure room to watch an interventional pain doc at work....

Scott Augustine, MD, begins an hourlong pitch about the dangers of the Bair Hugger forced-air patient warming system he invented — and is now campaigning against...

From speed bumps and sticky pads to arm tucks and tilt tests, you pull out all the stops to protect patients when you place them in the Trendelenburg position....