The St Elizabeth Healthcare organization in northern Kentucky has eight facilities, including two surgery centers. The flagship hospital on the Edgewood campus has 534 beds and 22 ORs and typically performs some 14,000 surgical procedures per year. Robots help manage the volume. The Edgewood, Florence, and Ft Thomas hospitals have…

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Imagine this: As a nurse in the OR talks with a patient, a computer listens in, recording the nurse’s notes so that data are added automatically to be retrieved later. The surgeon and anesthesiologist also interact with the patient without the burden of manual data entry, and the insurance company…

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Consider the following requests posed to OR scheduling staff by surgeons: • “I need two blocks in different rooms to accommodate my daily case volume.” • “Can’t I just use that empty room to start my next case while the first case is wrapping up?” Surgeon requests like these are…

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On September 15, 2022, AORN released its updated Guideline for Processing Flexible Endoscopes. Over the past several years, there has been significant research on flexible endoscope processing—research that met the stringent requirements and has been included in this revised guideline by AORN’s lead author and team. Endoscope processing begins with…

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Editor's Note In this study of Medicare patients, researchers from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, find that loneliness is associated with an increased risk of death at 30 days after nonelective surgery. Of 4,453 patients in the analysis, 623 (14%) had nonelective surgery. The mean loneliness score was 1.5. Unadjusted…

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Editor's Note The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) on November 10 issued a report outlining its plans, “for the first time,” to improve the transparency, accountability, and completeness of health equity data across its programs. “CMS defines health equity data as the combination of quantitative and qualitative elements…

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Today’s chat is with Ayumi Fielden, MSN, RN, CCRN-K, CPAN, Professional Practice Leader, Houston Methodist Hospital, Houston, Texas. Q: What is something that went right at your facility and/or that you are thankful for this year? We have a lot to be thankful for this year. We lost some surgical…

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Editor's Note This study from Spain finds that 59.7% of hospitalized and 67.5% of nonhospitalized COVID-19 patients had at least one symptom 2 years after infection. Of 360 hospitalized and 308 nonhospitalized COVID-19 patients analyzed, fatigue (161 vs 147), pain (129 vs 92), and memory loss (72 vs 49) were…

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Editor's Note Six more schools and hospitals have recently launched nursing programs or plan to do so in the future, the November 10 Becker’s Hospital Review reports. Corewell Health in Grand Rapids and Southfield, Michigan, will start the state’s first nurse apprentice program in 2023. Central Main Healthcare, Lewiston, will…

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Editor's Note This study led by researchers at Yale New Haven Hospital, New Haven, Connecticut, finds that many patients have unplanned hospital visits within 7 days of outpatient surgical procedures performed in hospital outpatient departments (HOPDs), often for potentially preventable reasons. The analysis included 1,135,441 outpatient surgical procedures performed at…

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