Certain procedures cause anxiety for patients. That’s especially true at my facility, where we’re treating children. When we received a $13,000 grant for 3 virtual reality...

When Outpatient Surgery Magazine invited me to walk the exhibit hall at the American Society of Cataract and Refractive Surgery (ASCRS) Annual Meeting in San Diego,...

Until they get cited in an inspection, most sterile processing departments are forced to cut corners and take shortcuts. My job is to arrive on the scene in advance of...

You might consider pressure injuries "out of sight, out of mind," or "not our problem." After all, you have no way of knowing you sent a patient home with a bed...

Millennials are lazy, entitled narcissists. Baby Boomers are tech-illiterate dinosaurs too set in their ways to learn anything new. These tired stereotypes are not only patently...

Your everyday focus is to improve patients’ lives through superior care while providing an experience that’s as pleasant and safe as possible. But what about engaging...

What do you see in this photograph: surgical smoke, right? This photo accompanied an article in last month’s issue about mandatory smoke evacuation legislation....

Besides the occasional complaint about incomplete sets or late-arriving trays, how can an OR manager grade the sterile processing department’s performance? We’ve got you...

We've all seen patients with post-op delirium. They're disoriented and confused immediately after surgery. They have trouble focusing and are unable to participate...

What type of immune response does your surgical mesh elicit in patients? That's a question you and your surgeons should ask, says Stephen F. Badylak, DVM, MD,...

In the early morning hours of Sept. 20, 2017, Hurricane Maria slammed into the southeast coast of Puerto Rico and tracked across the island with maximum sustained...

There are nurses, and then there are operating room nurses, those masked crusaders infused with a special blend of smarts, savvy and strength to stand up for patients...

The best defense for battling surgical site infections is a good offense. And part of a good offensive game plan is to make sure your OR nurses understand the importance...

Having music playing in a surgical facility can make patients more comfortable. As a nurse who’s also a Julliard-trained violinist, I’ve taken it a step further by performing...

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...

This interactive vending machine houses, tracks and dispenses Xenco Medical’s sterile-packaged spinal instruments and implants. The Wi-Fi-enabled machine uses an advanced...

First, a disclaimer on emerging alternative wound-closure devices: There is nothing superior to the traditional suture in terms of approximating wound edges. On this, plastic...

If you use IV start kits, you might be wasting money with every catheter you place. Our IV start kits contained a number of items we never used, including povidone-iodine...

It's easy to blame this case of wrong-person surgery on the pathologist who admittedly mixed up biopsy slides, but we're still left to wonder what if anything the OR team...

Dirty instruments, broken instruments, missing instruments. In an ideal world, we'd never have to worry about the sterile processing department (SPD) causing...