November 2021

Katie Yarber, RN, BSN, says delivering babies at Houston Methodist Hospital during the height of last year’s COVID-19 restrictions has been the highlight of her career. “It was...

The patient at John Muir Hospital was extremely anxious while waiting for her surgery to start and had no loved ones present to support her, which the pre-op nursing staff...

Patients decide to have their knees, hips and shoulders replaced when the debilitating effects of degenerative joint disease impact their daily lives, preventing them from...

Too often pressure injuries are thought of as an inpatient problem, an issue that’s highly unlikely to occur during the shorter procedures performed in outpatient facilities...

Hardworking professionals in ORs and sterile processing departments should respect each other’s efforts, but consternation between the two groups is often more common...

Charles E. Miller, MD, FACOG, had already sold his surgical team on the 4K video platform he wanted for performing same-day minimally invasive gynecologic surgeries....

Cataract surgery is usually performed quickly and typically without incident. It’s the recoveries that could prove problematic. Patients must administer a staggering number...

Electrosurgical devices are used in virtually every operating room across the country, so it’s worrisome that surgeons and surgical teams don’t receive formal training on how...

Patient optimization is a nebulous concept that can mean vastly different things to different providers. Joyce Wahr, MD, FAHA, believes the concept involves doing...

Anesthesia providers who dial back the anesthetic gases could save your facility money and go greener. The idea behind low-flow anesthesia is quite simple: Adjusting flows of inhalational agents to a “just right” level of...

Administrative staff can suffer from shoulder, back and neck strain caused by cradling phones between their ears and shoulders for hours on end, so Marisa Ynchausti, RN, BSN, clinical nurse manager at National Ambulatory...

Are you are on a first-name basis with the men and women who bring important supplies and equipment to your facility on a weekly (or sometimes daily) basis? Bill Willis, RN, the ASC director at Vance Thompson Vision in...

The administration at Heartland Surgery Center in Kearney, Neb., doesn’t wait around for standard holidays to let loose and have fun. “We celebrated national coffee day and had a local coffee shop deliver drinks,” says...

Patients who receive care at the Advanced Spine Center of Wisconsin in Neenah undergo long procedures, leaving patient escorts to sit for hours while they wait. “After a handful of patient satisfaction surveys noted that...

Medicare requires surgical facilities to have an emergency plan in place for rare and dire events that could take place in a healthcare setting. Of course, even the most comprehensive emergency plan won’t help if...

Coming up with a discreet way to identify patients who have bloodborne pathogens such as HIV or hepatitis B — infectious diseases that pose risks to staff members — simultaneously maintains patient dignity...

My young daughter wakes up in mid-sentence. Each morning, she stands next to me as I pack her lunch and talks about pinecones and princesses and Play-Doh. Mmm, hmm. Wow. Oh really?

I’m fully committed to integrating the practice of public health into surgery and tapped into my passion for health equity to help launch the Center for Surgical Health (CSH) at Penn Medicine, a program that focuses on improving...

At its core, shared governance is nothing more than giving the people who do the actual work a voice in how that work is done. While that sounds like common sense, surgical leaders everywhere know this isn’t often the case...

“Load up the SUV honey, because we’re moving to Arizona.” That’s how I broke the news to my wife last year when I agreed to become the CEO of a small surgical center in a rural part of northern Arizona. I spent most...

Colonoscopes are the workhorses of endoscopy centers. When evaluating these products, focus on their reliability, image quality and features that improve visualization and navigation for the endoscopist. Let’s drill down...

It’s the middle of a hectic day and your worst nightmare just happened. A patient has fallen, and now you must check for potential injuries and reassure them and their family members that everything is alright....

Great ideas for your OR

After what we endured in 2020, you’d think it’d be easy to find more than a few reasons to be thankful this year. But some folks are having trouble letting go of the chronic-complaint, woe-is-me mindset that was so easy...