Editor's Note The American College of Surgeons (ACS), on April 14, announced the launch of its new multi-year Power of Quality campaign aimed at improving care for all surgical patients by expanding its quality programs to more hospitals nationwide. These evidence-based quality programs have been proved to improve patient outcomes,…

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Editor's Note A quality improvement study led by clinicians at the Mayo Clinic in Jacksonville, FL, improved clinical alarm management skills and reduced alarm fatigue and desensitization among nurses in a surgical intensive care unit. The study included 115 direct-care nurses working full-time, modified full-time, or part-time schedules in a…

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Editor's Note The Food and Drug Administration (FDA), on April 12, issued a Safety Communication recommending that consumers, healthcare providers, and facilities not use certain surgical N95 respirators and to use caution with certain surgical masks and pediatric face masks, all manufactured by O&M Halyard. The FDA says it is…

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Editor's Note In this study, researchers from the Duke Infection Control Outreach Network Surveillance Team, Duke University School of Medicine,  Durham, North Carolina, find that surgical site infection (SSI) rates did not decrease in community hospitals from 2013 to 2018. SSI data was collected from patients having 26 common surgical…

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Editor's Note This Japanese study finds that surgical site infections (SSIs) were lower after intraoperative wound irrigation with normal saline than with povidone-iodine. A total of 941 patients having gastroenterological surgery were randomized to intraoperative wound irrigation for 1 minute before skin closure with 40 mL of aqueous povidone-iodine (study…

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Editor's Note In this study, led by the University of Alabama at Birmingham, overlapping surgery was shown to reduce in-hospital mortality and to have similar patient safety indicators and readmission rates as nonoverlapping cases. Operative time was shown to increase with overlapping cases. A total of 87,426 cases were included…

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Editor's Note Researchers at UHealth—the University of Miami Health System and the University of Miami Miller School of Medicine—show that, in two cases, COVID-19 breached the placenta and caused brain injury in the newborn. Both infants tested negative for the virus at birth, but had significantly elevated COVID-19 antibodies in…

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Editor's Note This study from the University of Texas Southwestern, Dallas, finds that nonoperative management of acute appendicitis was associated with reduced complications in older but not younger patients. Included in the analysis was data from the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality’s National Inpatient Sample on 474,845 patients with…

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Editor's Note This study from Stanford University finds that anesthesia residents who worked night float call rotations slept the same number of hours, but had less REM sleep, were more fatigued, and had less positive affect. All of these resolved a week after their rotation except fatigue. A total of…

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Editor's Note In this study, researchers from Yale School of Medicine, New Haven, Connecticut, find that violence-related trauma increased during the COVID-19 pandemic. Trauma registry data on 2,563 violence-related patient presentations in Connecticut from 2018 to 2021 were included in the analysis. The researchers found a: 55% increase in violence-related…

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