Performance Improvement 
It is with great excitement that we welcome you to the 2025 OR Manager Conference, taking place October 28–30 at the Anaheim Convention Center in California. This year’s event is a celebration of leadership, innovation, and collaboration across perioperative leadership, and we are thrilled you are here to be part…
Editor's Note Lock in system-level wins fast. The 2025 OR Manager Conference is right around the corner (October 28–30 in Anaheim, California), and it is loaded with how-to sessions that turn ideas into throughput, revenue, and workforce results you can bring home in Q4. This year’s agenda centers on pragmatic,…
Editor's Note A new study shows video-language models (VLMs) can accurately evaluate nursing skills and generate meaningful feedback, potentially transforming how future nurses are trained and assessed, Cornell University October 6 reports. The study describes the first framework to apply VLMs to automated nursing competency evaluation. According to the article,…
Editor's Note A new study shows hospitals can meaningfully reduce unnecessary preoperative testing for healthy patients undergoing low-risk surgeries without compromising safety or workflow, JAMA Network October 6 reports. The “Right-Sizing Testing Before Elective Surgery” (RITE-Size) strategy successfully lowered testing rates from 68.0% to 40.3% across three Michigan hospitals, while…
Office-based surgery (OBS) is one of the fastest-growing care settings in the US. From ophthalmology and dermatology to gastroenterology and even orthopedics, more procedures once limited to hospitals or ambulatory surgery centers (ASCs) are now being performed in medical office suites. Among many factors, the growth is being fueled by…
Editor's Note This year, the OR Manager Conference promises playbooks attendees can put to work the day they return home. The event, being held in Anaheim on October 28–30, targets the system-level goals perioperative leaders are accountable for: capacity, cost, culture, and safety across multi-site enterprises. Attendees will get concrete…
Editor's Note More than 31,000 Kaiser Permanente nurses and healthcare professionals are set to walk off the job on October 14 in what could be one of the largest healthcare strikes in recent history, Nurse.org October 7 reports. The 5-day strike, led by the United Nurses Associations of California/Union of…
Editor's Note The dismantling of the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH) jeopardizes worker safety nationwide and risks reversing decades of progress, New England Journal of Medicine October 4 reports. In April, sweeping federal workforce reductions eliminated more than 80% of NIOSH staff, closing laboratories and freezing core…
Editor's Note Training with surgical preference cards significantly lowers anxiety and strengthens clinical competence among OR nursing students, according to a randomized controlled trial published in BMC Medical Education on October 2. The study enrolled 60 OR nursing students in Iran between 2023 and 2024. Students were randomly assigned to…
With the explosion of GLP-1–based therapies for type 2 diabetes and weight loss, perioperative nursing teams, especially in the preoperative and postanesthesia care areas, need to be fluent in recognizing these medications. Some patients may arrive on these agents—or even novel oral GLP-1s—and the physiologic effects, especially delayed gastric emptying,…
