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

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...

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....

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...

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...

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....

Instead of discarding unused fentanyl in real time, your anesthesia provider aggregates all discards and brings them out for witnessing by another licensed professional...

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...

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...

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,...

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...

We place many of our neuro patients in the prone position. Until recently, we were also re-positioning them in the prone position. Quite a bit. Not good. The more you move...

I was a kid when I first learned about Will. He was the brother I never met. Will had been taken from my parents before I was born, when he was just 2 years old. One day,...

Let's make it a safe day, LBJ! That's what the charge nurse here at Lyndon B. Johnson Hospital in Houston announces to the entire perioperative team at the end of every morning...