June 2021

It was the end of a busy day in Stanford Hospital’s oncology clinic and I was completely spent from the grind of my responsibilities as a surgical intern. I wanted to find a quiet...

In our July 2020 issue, several surgical professionals bravely shared their experiences of racism and expressed hope for a more inclusive future. We asked them to reflect on...

In her quest to create an anti-racist healthcare system, DeAnna Minus-Vincent, MPA, often thinks about her grandfather. Ms. Minus-Vincent, senior vice president and chief...

 One of the common misconceptions providers have when caring for pediatric patients is thinking they’re little adults who can be treated with scaled-down versions of...

Keeping your patients safe is obviously a core value at your facility, yet compliance with best practices designed to avert serious complications and injuries is sometimes alarmingly low. Use this quiz as a starting point to gauge how well your staff is ready to spare your patients from unnecessary harm.

The medication errors that cause serious patient harm can be avoided through better safety practices and system changes. Half of the items that landed on the Institute for...

Communication apps and online management software improve overall efficiencies by helping to properly prepare patients for surgery and making sure cases start on time....

Endophthalmitis is a rare, but potentially devastating, eye infection that can cause permanent loss of vision. Advances in instrument sterilization practices, more effective...

When our management company instituted a day of service held on Martin Luther King Jr. Day, we jumped into action to see how we could support our local community. Two of our nurses, Patty Boyle and Dunbar Salin, worked with...

Hopefully, we’ll never experience another pandemic and mandatory shutdown of elective surgery again. But if we do, we now know exactly how to keep our staff busy with meaningful work while they wait to reenter the OR....

If it’s a chore to get everyone on board with helping to keep your facility clean, schedule “cleaning parties” during times when no surgeries are scheduled. During these dedicated cleaning days at our eye surgery center,...

Throughout my career as a perioperative director and surgery center administrator, I've developed information packets that inform my teams about what accreditation surveyors might look for and ask about. I eventually thought...

A year ago, Ari Collins agreed to speak with me weeks after the George Floyd murder ignited the nation’s racial and social reckoning. Ms. Collins, a surgical tech in Denver, shared her unfiltered thoughts about systemic racism...

Last year, Dallas-based Tenet Healthcare furloughed approximately 3,400 members of its workforce and specifically cited the pause in elective surgeries due to COVID-19 as the reason for the move. Of course, Tenet was hardly...

During my anesthesia training, instructors would often compare the complexities of administering sedation to learning how to fly a plane. Anesthesia providers, like their pilot counterparts, undergo rigorous training....

Bundled payments lead to cost-effective orthopedic care by allowing providers to make decisions based on what's best for their patients and the bottom line. How does it work?...

Spine tables are highly configurable, versatile and functional, and key to achieving clinical success in a specialty known for complex cases. When evaluating the options for purchase, the top concern is finding the right fit...

Great ideas for your OR

I started working as a nurse in 1980. Not even three weeks into my training, I was learning how to assist a difficult-to-work-with surgeon during a challenging case. The process brought me to tears — literally. At one point,...