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...

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...

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

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...

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,...

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....

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...

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...

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 nation's melting pot is at a full boil. Consider that racial and ethnic minorities in this country will become the majority population in the coming decades. The United States...

 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...

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...

Great Ideas for your OR

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...

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,...

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...

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...

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...

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...