You never know where you'll learn lessons about caring for patients, so I'm always on the lookout for excellence in service that I can translate to patient care....

Got both my knees replaced in late August — and both at the same time. Yes, I only had one surgery, one hospital stay and one course of rehabilitation, but the pain...

The long, narrow lumens of flexible endoscopes can make reprocessing the delicate instruments feel like an exercise in futility. But despite the inherent challenges...

It should come as no surprise that most outpatient facilities warm their surgical patients. After all, there's an ever-growing mountain of evidence that says warming...

Every patient who walks into your facility expects to undergo successful surgery and receive compassionate care. In today’s competitive, consumer-driven healthcare...

Sometimes you need to go old-school to get a key point across to your staff. We recently updated our periarticular injection cocktail as part of a multimodal pain...

Near the end of the day, 6 recovery room nurses were standing around the PACU desk chatting it up. Not one of them was doing chart reviews or making follow-up calls...

My mission from hospital leadership: Reduce sharps injuries in our 2 regional hospitals by 5% in a year. We far exceeded our goals, managing a 60% reduction from...

Patients’ friends or family members are often invited to bedsides in pre-op and the PACU, but don’t always have a place to sit as they offer support to their loved ones....

No food or drink past midnight is slowly giving way to carbo-loading up to 2 hours before surgery. Fasting past midnight has been an unwritten Ordinance of the OR...

In the absence of antibiotic alternatives, physicians in the early 1900s had no choice but to treat every infection with penicillin. Chronic pain went through a similar...

A large hospital had so many case carts full of trays backed up during the day they struggled to turn around instrument sets in less than 24 hours. Within 6 months,...

On the 1st day of Christmas my OR gave to me … PTSD from the Devil incarnate of a scrub tech I had to work with every day. I would call her a witch or a female dog...

Our surgery center doesn’t have a cafeteria, so family members who were waiting for their loved ones in surgery used to leave if they wanted a quick bite to eat. When surgeons...

Make Your Facility More Inclusive; Tips to help you navigate the landscape of sexual orientation and gender identification.

I've been blessed to check off another year as an OR nurse. Now is as good a time as any to give thanks for the good fortune and one-of-a-kind experiences...

Most surgical administrators dread the day. You know the one. It’s the morning you get the call that an accreditation surveyor is in the lobby waiting to analyze every...

A Better Way to Care for Autistic Patients; This protocol makes care easier on and better for patients, families and providers.

The effects of single-shot nerve blocks and oral analgesics wear off soon after patients arrive home, leaving them in a significant amount of discomfort....

Are you sure your staff is diverting recyclable materials from white bag waste? For 2 weeks I gathered and weighed recycling bags filled during procedures,...