Safety 
Despite your and your staff’s best intentions, do your facility’s hallways become clogged with equipment and other materials? Are your storage areas overflowing and spilling out into these important corridors? Is it a recurring situation where action is taken to clear the hallways and then, over the course of the…
Salisbury, Md., CBS affiliate WBOC-TV reports that a Talbot County jury has awarded nearly $1 million to a 76-year-old patient who claims a general surgeon at University of Maryland Shore Medical Center (UMSMC) in Easton, Md., failed to properly diagnose and treat his stomach issue during surgery, which led to permanent…
A fire at Bartlett Regional Hospital in Juneau, Alaska, delayed elective surgeries at the facility for several days. According to the hospital, the fire occurred last Thursday inside a utility closet within its surgical services unit due to a worker accidentally cutting into electrical heat tape. “A Code Red alert…
The ever-accelerating usage of glucagon-like peptide-1 (GLP-1) agonists among the general population is impacting perioperative teams that are concerned about patient safety. Two new studies from Hospital for Special Surgery (HSS) researchers provide what the institution calls “important early evidence” in terms of perioperative considerations for these patients. The studies,…
A prominent orthopedic surgeon has leveraged the platform of mass media outlet Fortune to call for increased transparency among his peers and their institutions to enable patients to make more informed decisions about whom they will allow to operate on them. Mathias Bostrom, MD, associate surgeon-in-chief and director of quality and…
Malignant hyperthermia (MH) is a rare but potentially fatal pharmacogenetic disorder of skeletal muscle triggered by exposure to volatile anesthetics or succinylcholine. It’s a particular danger in the OR, and providers must always watch for its signs and collaborate to respond as quickly as possible to save the patient on…
Patient safety watchdog The Leapfrog Group yesterday announced an expansion of its Ambulatory Surgery Center (ASC) Public Reporting Program. It says the redesigned initiative to rate the safety of nearly 4,000 U.S. ASCs will go public in late July. Leapfrog President and CEO Leah Binder calls it a “game changer,”…
A new cluster randomized crossover trial study published on JAMA Open by Wake Forest University researchers examines whether continuous (rather than intermittent) vital sign monitoring reduces abnormalities in blood pressure, oxygenation, and heart rate during the initial 48 hours after noncardiac surgery. Using four-week ward clusters among 798 postoperative patients, “the…
A new narrative review study posted Monday on Cureus, “Patients With Obesity on the Acute Care Surgery Service: Improving Outcomes,” posits that obesity now “represents a defining characteristic of the emergency general surgery (EGS) population," and that many clinicians and health systems need to account for this reality in their care…
A recent study by researchers at Bon Secours Tuckahoe Orthopedics of Richmond, Va., examined whether the personal cloth scrub caps that some surgeons like to wear in the OR could put patients at greater risk of surgical site infections. The study, published in the journal Patient Safety in Surgery, examined the…
