Safety - New Products for Surgery - July, 2006

7 tips to prevent medication errors. Ensure the right dose of the right medication reaches the right patient.

The number of unintended retained surgical items (URSIs) reported to The Joint Commission (TJC) continued to decline in 2022, with 88 events disclosed...

Airway management is one of the most important skills any anesthesia provider should master for one very good reason: Complications from difficult airways and poor management of those airways, though rare, can be life-threatening....

The best way to mitigate risk is to catch it before it happens. That’s the whole idea behind standardizing a surgical checklist — providing constant confirmation to safely ensure the patient’s care....

Patient and staff safety are obvious core values of every surgical organization. Yet problems in this realm are ever-present, and less-than-stellar...

Sheldon S. Sones, RPh, FASCP, is president and founder of Sheldon Sones and Associates. Based in Connecticut, the company has provided more than 200 surgical...

Patient warming stories tend to focus heavily on the “comfort” factor. That makes sense when you hear about all the positive comments and high satisfaction scores that tend to...

Strong communication is the essential component in a perioperative culture of safety. It means clear, consistent and respectful interactions among all team members to...

Nearly half of the 1,575 sentinel events reported to The Joint Commission (TJC) last year were falls. Tied for second were wrong surgeries: There were 127 incidents, or 8% of all...

Sentinel events are often referred to as “never events” because of the potentially serious harm they pose to patients that should never happen....

Are you using the right 503B outsourcing facility for your needs? It’s a multilayered question that ASCs and HOPDs should return to regularly....

The safety of both staff and patients is at risk every day in the OR as potentially harmful pathogens and organisms lurk on the environment. OR teams rely on efficient...

There’s a reason surgeons who perform outpatient spine surgery will say proper positioning is as important as the procedure itself. Improper positioning increases the...

Proper instrument cleaning and care are, of course, essential components of the surgical process....

More unintended retention of foreign object incidents were reported to The Joint Commission (TJC) in 2024 than in any of the four previous years, according to the...

From strict quality and safety standards to mitigation against drug shortages, the benefits of 503B outsourcing facilities are well documented — and a major selling point...

Success in total joint replacements relies on precision across every step of the perioperative journey — including something as seemingly simple as keeping patients warm....

Endoscopes are critical tools that assist in the performance of minimally invasive procedures by helping the provider examine internal body cavities and organs....

The guidance for storing flexible endoscopes starts with a simple enough premise: Make sure the cabinets you choose are expressly designed for that purpose....