OBJECTIVE To review the effect of interventions designed to decrease turnover time in infants and children (median age, 2.6 years; range, 1 month to 10 years) who required examinations under anesthesia. METHODS Five efficiency interventions (3 anesthesia providers for 2 rooms, digital remote communication, change in patient scheduling, standardization of case order, and streamlining administr...

A great loss has been suffered by our profession, and it is fitting that this Society should pause in its clinical proceedings to pay tribute to Harvey Cushing. In his character and his career was the stuff of which inspiring tradition is made. At the opening of the Montreal Neurological Institute five years ago he was guest speaker and a biographical sketcht appeared in our Foundation Volume. ...

BACKGROUND Previous research has identified 2 psychological biases in operating room (OR) decisions on the day of surgery: risk attitude of the decision-maker at the OR control desk and decisions made by OR staff to increase clinical work per unit time during the hours they are assigned. Resulting decisions are worse than random chance at reducing overutilized time. To isolate the second bias f...

25 JOURNAL OF MOBILE TECHNOLOGY IN MEDICINE VOL. 6 ISSUE 3 DECEMBER 2017 Background: In production environments, a countdown timer is used to report the status of the planned start time and to provide both a communication mechanism and an accountability aid. It has been used in the airline industry to remind all personnel of the remaining time until when the aircraft door should be closed. This...

BACKGROUND There are no clear guidelines for how long a sterile operating-room tray can be exposed to the open environment before the contamination risk becomes unacceptable. The purpose of this study was to determine the time until first contamination and the rate of time-dependent contamination of sterile trays that had been opened in a controlled operating-room environment. We also examined ...

OBJECTIVES/HYPOTHESIS Surgical education remains an important mission of academic medical centers. Financial pressures may favor improved operating room (OR) efficiency at the expense of teaching in the OR. We aim to evaluate factors, such as resident participation, associated with duration of total OR, as well as procedural time of common pediatric otolaryngologic cases. STUDY DESIGN Retrosp...

In this issue of RESPIRATORY CARE we are fortunate to have an article by Kempainen and Brunette1 that offers the practitioner a reasoned treatise on hypothermia, its implications and treatments. As indicated by the authors, there are some 700 deaths per year from hypothermia in the United States; however, there are many more nonfatal cases per year, and also cases of hypothermia reported as som...

PURPOSE The direct influence of environmental cleanliness and risk manipulations on prepared syringes was evaluated. METHODS Media-fill testing was used to estimate potential microbial contamination. Syringes were prepared in three different environments using four different uncontrolled high-risk manipulations. The three environments included an International Organization for Standardization...

The performance of operative surgery has an understandable focus placed on dexterity, technical precision, as well as the choice of procedure. There is less appreciation of the cognitive and social skills of the individual surgeon and the effect that these have on the surgical team and on patient outcome. This article highlights that impact and explores the contribution of non-technical skills ...