October 2022

This special issue of Outpatient Surgery Magazine is dedicated to safety from both the patient and the staff perspectives. It’s a topic that is near and dear to me for many reasons. As a nurse with more 30 years’ experience working at...

When Illinois Governor J.B. Pritzker signed into law last year a measure that required hospitals and ambulatory surgery centers to eliminate surgical smoke, it was a big win for the nurses...

Surgery is currently dominated by two forms of turnover: The turnover of breaking down and setting up for the next case and that of OR personnel jumping ship or retiring. This combination of fast-paced scheduling and increasingly...

Not long after we opened the doors to our small outpatient center in 2004, we experienced our first sharps injury. That was just the wake-up call we needed to ensure the event was a one-off mistake and not an unfortunate...

The effects of a single retained surgical item (RSI) are often catastrophic to the unfortunate patients who fall victim to these sentinel events. As for the facilities who commit these never-events, the Pennsylvania Patient Safety Authority...

There’s no shortage of compelling data and research on exactly what it takes to prevent pressure injuries. The trick is finding practical ways to put that evidence into...

A high-volume OR is booked to perform six consecutive hand surgeries. Five are scheduled on the right hand, and one, the fourth operation of the day, which is scheduled for 3 p.m., is scheduled on the left hand....

Sound electrosurgical safety practices often come down to preventing complacency from setting in among the staff who use these high-powered devices to cut and coagulate tissue during countless surgical procedures.

It looks at one of the core challenges the American healthcare system faces today, through the lens of interviews with experts across the healthcare spectrum, by exploring solutions to the problem, rather than maliciously...