Editor's Note This study led by researchers at the VA Greater Los Angeles Healthcare System and David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA, Los Angeles, finds that postoperative mortality was higher in Black men than Black women, White men, and White women. A total of 1,868,036 Black and White Medicare…

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Editor's Note The Joint Commission on March 1 announced a revision to Performance Improvement (PI) standard PI:01.01.01, Element of Performance (EP) 4, which has to do with data collection on significant discrepancies between preoperative and postoperative diagnoses. The revision was made after healthcare organizations expressed confusion with the requirement. The…

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Editor's Note This study from the Mayo Clinic finds that despite calls for the expansion of outpatient surgery to mitigate the growing backlog of surgical cases during COVID-19, the transition of general surgery procedures from inpatient to outpatient settings occurred in only a small subset of procedures. This cohort study…

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Editor's Note This study led by researchers at Weill Cornell Medicine, New York City, finds no significant improvements over the last decade in postoperative outcomes in women undergoing coronary artery bypass grafting (CABG) surgery. This retrospective cohort study included 1,297,204 (317,716 were women) patients who had primary CABG surgery between…

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Editor's Note A study published in the British Journal of Sports Medicine found that in people over 50 years of age, not being able to balance on one foot for 10 seconds was associated with a higher risk of all-cause mortality within the next 10 years, the February 24 cnbc.com…

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Editor's Note This study by researchers from Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center and Harvard Medical School, Boston, finds that preoperative surgeon intuition is an independent predictor of postoperative complications, but it isn’t as strong as the predictive power of the American College of Surgeons National Surgical Quality Improvement Program (ACS-NSQIP)…

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Editor's Note A recent Health Day-Harris Poll online survey finds that 63% of nurse and physician respondents are experiencing moderate or severe burnout at work, the February 23 Health Day News reports. Other findings include: 66% of physicians and 75% of nurses cite understaffing as the main contributor to burnout…

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Editor's Note The Joint Commission, on February 22, announced that it had approved new and revised requirements for hospitals and critical access hospitals in the Patient Blood Management certification program. The program is a voluntary 2-year certification based on the Association for the Advancement of Blood and Biotherapies Standards for…

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Float teams have been a staple of nurse-staffing plans for many years, but they have not been widely used in the operating room. Utah Valley Hospital, a Level II trauma center in Provo, Utah, and part of the Intermountain Healthcare system, has been developing float teams for nearly 2 decades.…

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When Ayumi Fielden, MSN, RN, CCRN-K, CPAN, worked as a preceptor in a PACU nurse residency program for new graduate nurses, she realized quickly that something was missing. “The graduate nurses struggled because they were not yet comfortable with basic nursing skills, such as assessments and giving medications. They also…

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