Imagine sitting through a discussion with a surgeon or nurse and not understanding a single word—or worse, misinterpreting key information. Unfortunately, that’s the situation for many patients and their families because millions of people in the US have insufficient health literacy skills. A review in the American Journal of Surgery…

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Use of personal mobile devices is pervasive in surgery departments. As in the rest of life, they bring benefits but also risks, OR Manager found in an online survey. An overwhelming majority of respondents—86%—say they believe personal use of mobile devices in the OR sometimes distracts providers from patient care.…

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A 20-year-old nursing student, Emily, was excited to be on her pediatrics rotation and taking care of Tommy, a 3-year-old leukemia patient. One day, when Tommy’s mom was out of the room, Emily asked Tommy if she could take his picture. He readily agreed. When she got home, Emily excitedly…

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Nurses texting between—or even during—cases. Anesthesia providers playing games on their cell phones. A surgeon answering calls during surgery using his Bluetooth device. Mobile devices like smartphones and tablets have introduced a brand of constant communication—and a management challenge. Banning the devices isn’t the answer. Instead, health care needs to…

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Where would you expect a patient to look to learn about the quality of your hospital’s services? Maybe the Joint Commission, Hospital Compare, or HealthGrades? Think Facebook, Google Reviews, or YouTube—that’s where many are likely to turn first. Social media increasingly are the go-to source for consumer reviews of any…

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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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"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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Checklists, time-outs, and other patient safety tools are supposed to make care safer. But what happens when a safety tool alerts a team to a problem that otherwise would have been missed and could harm a patient? Will team members speak up? The vast majority—85%—of nurses in a new study…

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Ophthalmology and orthopedics led the list of OR specialties with incorrect surgery in an analysis of 51⁄2 years of data from 130 Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) facilities. A wrong implant was the most common error type for both specialties, accounting for 22 of 45 ophthalmology events and 12 of…

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A structured OR team briefing before a case can dramatically reduce communication failures, a new study from Canada finds. In the study surgeons, nurses, and anesthesia providers held a short briefing guided by a checklist. Researchers documented communication problems before and after the briefings were implemented. Results showed communication failures…

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