Elective surgeries are back on the schedule and staff are returning under new circumstances and different expectations. As you begin to perform procedures amid the...

I’m known for crafting surgical caps made of bright colorful fabric and giving them to my colleagues as small gestures of how much I appreciate working with them....

If your ears begin to feel the pinch from wearing masks all day as you return work during the coronavirus outbreak, reach for a Barrel of Monkeys. It's one of the many...

Now that electives are back on, I’ve become nostalgic for insanely packed days of 25-plus surgeries with four rooms humming, nurses crisscrossing the hall and a waiting...

irst, I felt nauseous. Then, I felt pain in my lower abdomen. My head began to ache, and I had a slight temperature. It was early April, during the peak of the coronavirus...

Anesthesia providers are placing intubation boxes between themselves and the patients they're intubating to serve as a barrier against COVID-19-containing aerosolized...

There's no time like the present to take full advantage of regional anesthesia to manage post-op pain. Nerve blocks are being placed with more precision, patients are...

Awareness continues to develop around the negative health effects of surgical smoke, which contains harmful chemicals, carcinogens, bacteria and viruses. Spending a full...

Prewarming Works Wonders; Early interventions to maintain normothermia reduce infection risks and increase patient satisfaction.

You recently took to social media to host a Q&A about the coronavirus. What surprised you most about the response?...

Any reprocessing tech worth their scrub brush knows dirty instruments can't be properly sterilized. There's another instrument care risk hiding in plain sight, however,...

The sterile processing staff at Winchester (Va.) Medical Center reprocesses trays of instruments sent to them from 15 ORs. That's a lot to manage, so perhaps it's no surprise...

From the HIV crisis of the 1980s to the H1N1 pandemic of 2009 to the Ebola outbreak in 2014, Maureen Spencer, MEd, RN, CIC, FAPIC, has seen a lot during her more than...

Imagine working in a facility where 50 orthopedic surgeons have their own unique skin prepping protocols. Factor in 20 nurses who are trying to support the variations...

When Can Vendor Reps Return to ORs? New recommendations support their safe reentry during the COVID-19 pandemic.

High-volume surgery centers need to take advantage of any operational enhancements they can to stay ahead of the game. That's why we've become proactive about IV starts...

Reprocessing technicians have one of the most important jobs in an endoscopy center. The complicated and detailed task of cleaning and reprocessing multiple scopes...

When the coronavirus outbreak caused a shortage of personal protective equipment at our hospital, we jumped at the chance to help and developed the prototype for a DIY...

A one-word sign on a fleet of fluid waste management carts lets your OR team know which devices have been emptied and cleaned and which ones haven’t. After we...

Like some of you, I had planned to canvas the booths in the exhibit hall at the American Academy of Orthopaedic Surgeons Annual Meeting in Orlando in March....