Retained foreign objects was the most frequently reported adverse event between 2015 and 2017, according to The Joint Commission. We decided to tackle this issue head on by developing a custom count board...

The two-inch red circle on the patient's sacrum was unmistakable. A PACU nurse noticed the deep tissue injury during a post-op assessment and called over to pre-op to see if one of her colleagues had documented...

If you want to roll out a patient warming protocol that requires your facility to invest time, resources money — and, of course, a change to the status quo — you need to give leadership a compelling reason why...

Adverse events involving wrong-site, wrong-side and wrong-patient errors are devastating outcomes for surgeons who must live with the mistakes and patients who suffer unnecessary physical scars. These never events persist ...

Retained foreign objects were the most frequently reported adverse event between 2015 and 2017, according to The Joint Commission. We decided to tackle this issue head on by developing a custom count board...

No surgeon wakes up in the morning with the intention of performing a wrong-site surgery and yet these types of never events continue to happen, even with protocols...

Let me tell you why Black patients should have access to more Black doctors. Last June, I underwent surgery to remove osteomata (benign tumors) from my forehead and a...

Some of the drugs and fluids used most often in surgical facilities go in and out of shortage daily due to interruptions in the supply chain, a problem exacerbated by the...

The Secret to Safer Surgery; Capturing real-time data during procedures leads to enhanced patient care

You authored the world's bestselling primer Understanding Patient Safety. What's the single most important component of keeping patients safe?...

Keeping surgical patients warm and their core body temperature above 36 ?C is not only critical to their comfort, but also their safety. Unplanned perioperative hypothermia...

If you think residents of nursing homes are the only people who wind up with agonizing pressure injuries because they've been laying in the same position for weeks...

Years ago, Valerie Y. Marsh, BSN, MSN, DNP, CNOR, was sure a sponge had been left inside a patient. "The surgeon swore it wasn't in there, and he wasn't going to reopen...

You never know how your staff will respond to a rare but potentially deadly malignant hyperthermia (MH) event until it actually occurs. When we found ourselves facing...

Wrong-site surgeries occur approximately 40 times a week in facilities across the U.S. Surgical professionals must therefore ask themselves why these avoidable errors...

For the longest time, we believed safer equipment and safety procedures were the way to prevent sharps injuries. But after years of increased focus on sharps safety, this hasn't been...

Putting patients in steep Trendelenburg is arguably one of the most challenging positioning tasks your OR staff faces. With the number of robotic urologic and...

MYTH #1: A post-op fever is indicative of MH FACT: Many clinicians worry that MH may begin in the postoperative period with a fever...

Inadvertent perioperative hypothermia is a preventable complication that can have disastrous consequences. A patient whose temperature dips below 36 C will react to...

When the Joint Commission looked at the most commonly reported sentinel events from ambulatory care organizations in 2018 and the first half of 2019, wrong-site...