Creating more diversity within academic surgery requires a targeted, long-term and dedicated approach. It's a worthwhile goal. Eliminating long-standing racial and...

Ultrathin endoscopes have proven to be invaluable instruments for examining the upper GI tract of patients with challenging anatomy, even if that wasn't their intended...

Renowned neurosurgeon John Boockvar, MD, strides into an operating room at Lenox Hill Hospital and greets members of his surgical team as they gather in a loose circle....

Surgical site infections (SSIs) are expensive adverse events for surgical facilities, especially with procedures like total joint replacements and complex spine cases....

If you went out of your way to get recycling bins into your ORs, the last thing you want is for all your green efforts to go to waste when recyclables accidentally wind up getting...

"The OR is on fire!" Did we get your attention? Approximately 500 surgical fires occur every year in the U.S.,...

Patients often sit nervously in the reception area as they wait to hear their name loudly called when it's time to get prepped for surgery. To take some of the stress out of...

You might use covert monitoring methods and punitive punishments to improve your staff's compliance with hand hygiene protocols, but I believe in overt observations...

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...

When our chief medical officer joined our daily safety huddle one morning, I saw a golden opportunity to get our smoke-free OR program off the ground. I'd been trying...

Patients are informed before and after surgery about the amount of post-op pain they're likely to experience. To complement those important discussions, we created...

With public health experts sounding the alarm about the likelihood of a second COVID-19 spike this winter in the midst of flu season, whole room disinfection technologies are...

Marking trash bags with an OR's room number is a simple way to shorten the search for misplaced instruments. No matter how many instrument counts take place...

On a winter’s evening in 2017, Chris Fuller, MD, was about to cut into the most vibrant green bell pepper he had ever seen. “It was splayed before me, in brilliant 4K high-def...

There's no question major changes have been made in the OR as a result of COVID-19. Of course, changes come with a lot of complaints. We perioperative nurses would...

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...

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...

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...

Be careful, the floor's wet and slippery. Colbie Fredette, RN, absentmindedly repeats that phrase without looking up whenever someone walks into the OR during fluid-heavy...

Do you ever notice how your fresh stock of facility-logoed pens always seem to disappear? If you don't want to lecture staff about "stealing" your dwindling supplies,...