A patient’s condition can change in the blink of an eye. Are you prepared to respond? And what happens if the patient dies? This is the focus of an annual seminar at Houston Methodist Hospital that was developed to increase the comfort level of perioperative nurses caring for a patient…

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Providing sterile instrumentation for patient care is a basic fundamental of surgery, and ensuring sterility means that instrumentation must first be thoroughly cleaned, step by step. Point-of-use treatment, an important part of this process, is gaining the attention of accrediting agencies such as the Joint Commission, and it is included…

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Editor's Note Though recent guidelines mandating additional barrier attire for all scrubbed and unscrubbed OR personnel from the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) and Joint Commission, which include bouffant caps covering all hair and long-sleeved surgical attire covering all exposed skin, this study finds that this mandate does…

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Editor's Note In this study, a significant association was found between exposure to World Trade Center dust and long-term cardiovascular disease (CVD) risk in firefighters. Of 9,796 firefighters analyzed, those who arrived first at the World Trade Center when dust was the thickest were found to have a 44% increased…

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Editor's Note The Food & Drug Administration (FDA) announced September 4 that it will hold a Medical Devices Advisory Committee Meeting in November to discuss ethylene oxide (EO) sterilization of medical devices, including methods to reduce EO emissions. The committee also will provide recommendations on reducing infection risks from reprocessed…

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Editor's Note Senior surgical residents can safely supervise junior residents performing appendectomies, and training programs should encourage faculty to let senior residents manage operative appendicitis as independently as possible as well as supervise junior residents intraoperatively, this study finds. In this review of 928 appendectomies performed at the University of…

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Editor's Note This review article finds that surgical smoke is dangerous, but the severity of the risk has yet to be been determined. Therefore, no safe level is known. Though numerous studies have been performed on the chemical composition of surgical smoke, the components remain unclear. The variability is likely…

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Extensive research by Cori L. Ofstead, MSPH, and her colleagues at Ofstead & Associates (St Paul, Minnesota) has raised concerns about insufficient reprocessing of gastrointestinal endoscopes and ureteroscopes—even when recommended practices are followed—and their new study makes a compelling case for more stringent reprocessing of bronchoscopes as well. In their…

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Healthcare workers are at risk for bloodborne pathogen exposures in areas ranging from the clinic to the OR—both inpatient and outpatient settings. Such exposures not only cause anxiety, they cost an estimated $3,000 to $5,000 per exposure for things such as baseline and follow-up laboratory testing, treatment of exposed personnel,…

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Editor's Note Opioid prescriptions for patients having common outpatient surgical procedures at a large university hospital in Florida were substantially reduced within 6 months after implementation of state legislation limiting the duration of opioid prescriptions, this study finds. Of 1,467 surgical patients included in the study: The proportion receiving opioid…

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