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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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

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...

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...

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?

Focusing on the clinical aspects of multiple complex procedures during a busy day of surgery is stressful for surgical teams, so it’s understandable that the basic steps...

What does safe surgical care mean to you? Eliminating avoidable adverse events by developing and maintaining competent teams...

A little knowledge is a dangerous thing. Surgeons clearly don’t intend to cause stray energy burns when they cut and coagulate tissue with energy-based surgical...

Proper medication safety requires surgical leaders to ask some very tough questions. Are employees stealing drugs for consumption or resale? Did a staffer not dilute a drug...

Proper medication safety requires surgical leaders to ask some very tough questions. Are employees stealing drugs for consumption or resale? Did a staffer not dilute a drug...

Why don’t all healthcare facilities employ some sort of surgical smoke evacuation system? Not only does surgical smoke smell and obstruct the surgeon’s view of the...

Using barcode scanning or radio-frequency identification to confirm the accuracy of manual counts will result in fewer sponges left inside patients, yet surgical professionals...

A nurse suffers a serious back injury while trying to lift a patient without help. A patient falls during the transition from the OR to the PACU. Unfortunately, these issues happen...