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Surgeons have long been reluctant to use blunt suture needles, but new messages from the American College of Surgeons (ACS), the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), and the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH) may get their attention. Those organizations are actively promoting the use of blunt suture needles.
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One of the benefits of sponsoring community events or open houses is increasing awareness of your facility's name in a positive light. While most outpatient surgery program managers are pleased with direct contact with business leaders, referring physicians, potential patients, and community members, media coverage increases the audience that learns about the program.
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Imagine a communitywide outbreak so pervasive that employees fell ill at work, 40% called in sick, and even the chief nursing executive pitched in to work as a staff nurse.
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With almost 49% of the respondents to the 2007 Same-Day Surgery Salary Survey reporting that their staff sizes have increased during the past year, the challenge of recruiting new employees and retaining experienced employees grows and is exacerbated by the nursing shortage and the aging of the work force.
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When a patient death occurs in outpatient surgery, you do have a choice about whether you report the occurrence to The Joint Commission.
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There are some situations that come up repeatedly in ambulatory surgery settings that can be life threatening, warns Anne Dean Schilling, RN, BSN, consultant with The ADA Group, a DeLand, FL-based consulting firm specializing in ambulatory surgical development and regulatory compliance.
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I had the pleasure of touring several facilities since last month. Three surgery centers and two hospital surgical departments stand out.
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Although blunt suture needles are rare in the operating room, other safer practices have begun to take hold.
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For the fist time since The Joint Commission began keeping records of sentinel events in 1996, wrong-site surgery has reached the No. 1 position over patient suicide in terms of cumulative data. There have been 552 reports of wrong-site surgery, yet it is viewed as an event that often is underreported.
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Do you and your staff have an extra 55 hours a year? That's the amount of time the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) estimates that you and your ambulatory surgery center (ASC) staff would spend complying with new and revised Conditions for Coverage (CfC) for ASCs.
