Outpatient Surgery Magazine Archive

When Stamford Health (Conn.) discovered a lack of standardization in its skin antisepsis protocols, the OR leaders at the facility knew they had act. After all, inconsistency is the enemy of an effective prepping process....

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....

I remember my first paycheck. It was made on a now-vintage machine, the kind with a hand crank that imprinted the amount: Ten Dollars. That was my starting salary for a week-long summer gig as a kid at my grandfather's...

Patients were already a bit nervous when they would arrive for their endoscopies or colonoscopies, and we noticed that sitting in the waiting room watching the news would often stress them out more. We thought, why not get rid...

Retained foreign objects were the most frequently reported adverse event between 2015 and 2017, according to The Joint Commission. We decided to tackle this issue head on by developing a custom count board...

There are several ways to ensure your staff is properly trained to handle a malignant hyperthermia emergency. Making them sit through yet another annual in-service or having them read dry educational materials...

CMS requires surgery centers to have infection preventionists on staff. Some facilities assign providers to the role simply to fulfil the requirement, but infection prevention has taken on a greater significance during...

You can use ultrasound to identify landmarks and assist in the placement of an epidural, but it does not guarantee the catheter will end up in the epidural space. That's why loss-of-resistance training for the gold standard...

To help our surgeons find their patients quickly and easily in recovery, we hung a series of color-coded flags on the wall outside each bay. The series of flags are screwed into the wall, allowing us to flip one out as needed....

Many surgical professionals learn best by doing. If you bombard them with information about what to do in the event of a malignant hyperthermia (MH) emergency, but don't...