May 2021

Surgeons undergo years of intense training to learn how to return patients to good health, yet receive little instruction on how to maintain their own well-being. After long...

Members of the perioperative team at The Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore work many challenging surgeries on very sick patients, yet can count the number of pressure...

Ask a dozen orthopedic surgeons if they prefer to enter the hip from the front or back during joint replacement procedures and you might get a dozen different answers....

Daniel Gomez, MD, FACOG, FACS, vividly remembers the day during his third year of residency when he was operating with one of his attending physicians. As they were...

The better surgeons can see anatomy during minimally invasive abdominal procedures, the more precise their work will be. Ultra-high-def camera systems, image-enhancement...

William P. Barrett, MD, had a patient scheduled for a knee revision surgery when he ran into a problem. The patient’s joint pain was so great that they desperately needed some...

Hand and wrist fracture repairs are rapidly moving from hospital settings to freestanding ambulatory surgery centers because surgeons have proven they can...

A week before surgery, the patients of William Ryan Spiker, MD, a board-certified orthopedic spine surgeon with University of Utah Health in Salt Lake City, start receiving daily text messages about their upcoming procedures....

We’ve heard some wonderful stories about facilities that repurposed blue wrap to make sleeping mats and blankets for the homeless, and wanted to do something similar. Our blue wrap was too small to repurpose in that capacity,...

AORN guidelines stipulate that hair should be clipped around surgical sites to reduce the risk of infection. To make sure pre-op staff properly clip the right areas, we filled a binder with procedure-specific pages that indicate...

Our hospital used to have an issue with surgical team members wearing scrubs out of the facility, washing them at home and wearing them back to work, habits that went against proper laundering protocols and prevented us...

Have you ever noticed a colleague not following hand hygiene protocols or forgetting to wipe down equipment with the proper cleaning products? It can be uncomfortable to call them out, especially in front of a patient. We use...

Many nursing students aren’t afforded a surgical rotation or clinical observation of an operating room during their schooling, so we created A Day in the Life of an OR Nurse program to showcase how rewarding working in...

We keep an emergency flip chart at the front desk of our ASC that’s filled with easy-to-follow emergency response protocols. We also conduct true-to-life safety drills to make sure our staff is ready for nearly any situation...

I’ll never forget when I first learned of the world wide web. It was the mid-90s and I was in my college apartment watching Seinfeld when my roommate Rob burst through...

There is currently no clear consensus for when it’s safe to operate on patients who are recovering from COVID-19. A baseline was set in March with the publication of an international, multicenter study by the enormous...

I was in New York City working at the Hospital for Special Surgery when the pandemic hit. The outpatient ORs in which I was training to advance my skills as a minimally invasive spine specialist were turned into intensive care...

What a difference a year can make. Even as vaccines are being administered and lingering restrictions brought on by the pandemic are being lifted, your center must be prepared to face continuing COVID-related...

Last month, the FDA announced it was investigating post-procedure infections and contamination issues involving urological endoscopes that were cited in 450 Medical Device Reports (MDRs) from January 2017 to...

Great Ideas for your OR

Complaining is as American as baseball (the games are too long!) and apple pie (the crust isn’t flaky enough!). Many of our problems simply aren’t that serious, but that doesn’t stop us from griping about, well,...