Even if your facility isn’t on the frontlines of the battle to combat COVID-19, you can still find ways to join in and help. For our temporarily shuttered surgery center, that meant...

Many surgical staff members went to areas hit hardest by COVID-19 to lend their desperately needed skills to patients infected by the virus. Even those who weren't on...

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...

As elective procedures resume during the COVID-19 outbreak, you need to tactfully communicate with anxious patients, help financially strapped individuals afford surgery,...

We wanted to know if surgeons are liking what they’re seeing during surgery, so last month we asked readers for their thoughts on the imaging technologies used in...

One positive that's come out of the COVID-19 pandemic is a renewed focus on proper infection control practices. Facilities everywhere are ramping up their protocols...

Elective procedures are beginning again in areas of the country where the curve of the new coronavirus is flattening. If you already have strong infection prevention...

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,...

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...

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...

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...