OR Manager; Vol. 27 No. 9; September 2011 The government’s long-awaited plan for quality reporting by ambulatory surgery centers (ASCs) was issued July 1, 2011. If the proposal is finalized later this fall, the time-line could be short. ASCs might need to have quality-reporting systems in place as early as…

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"When was the last time you relived a favorite bedtime routine from your past? Do you remember the special feeling and aroma of a warm bath, clean pajamas, and freshly laundered sheets with a relaxing bedtime story and a cup of warm milk or bedtime tea?" This is one tip…

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Sometimes it's all in a word. Struggling for compliance with the pause before surgery, a Michigan hospital tried changing the terminology, and that has made all the difference. Instead of "time-out," the new term is "patient safety briefing." Once the change was made, "we saw immediately that the focus changed,"…

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Laptops are stolen from a physician's office in a break-in, compromising data for hundreds of patients. An employee loses a personal hard drive that contains patient data. A radiologist joins a new outpatient facility and contacts patients from his previous employer, using information he downloaded before he left. Is your…

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Flexible endoscope reprocessing continues to be a major focus in infection prevention. All of the known cases of pathogen transmission during GI endoscopy have been traced to breaches in accepted cleaning and disinfection guidelines or other infection prevention practices. A revised Multisociety Guideline on Reprocessing Flexible GI Endoscopes, released in…

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"Our society has become a lot louder, and we tolerate a lot more noise," says Verna Gibbs, MD, director of NoThing Left Behind and professor of clinical surgery, University of California, San Francisco. That includes the OR, where phones, overhead pages, alarms, suction, ventilation equipment, medical devices such as drills,…

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Gently probing a wound with a dry cotton swab after surgery for a perforated appendix dramatically reduced infections in a study. Only 3% of patients who had the daily probing got surgical site infections (SSIs) compared with 19% in the control group who did not. Though the exact mechanism isn't…

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Editor's note AUGUST 2011 OR leaders are striving to make evidence-based decisions about new technology. OR Manager, Inc., and ECRI Institute have joined in a collaboration to bring quarterly supplements with summaries of the Institute's Emerging Technology Evidence Reports to OR Manager readers. ECRI Institute is an independent nonprofit organization…

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