The optimal timing of the preanesthesia evaluation varies with the patient's comorbidities. As anesthesiologists assume a broader role in perioperative care, there may be opportunities to provide additional patient management beyond historical routine anesthesia services. This study was thus undertaken to survey our institutional perioperative clinicians regarding their perceptions of patient m...

Patient positioning is an integral part of perioperative care and yet it is an area of patient care which can easily be compromised as staff try to accommodate surgeons and work through busy operating lists. Inadequate padding and incorrect positioning can cause serious and long term injury and disability, and can result in litigation against perioperative nurses and ODPs.

OSA affects 2 – 26% of the general population [1]. The perioperative management of patients with OSA begins with preoperative identification, after which plans are made to tailor specific intraoperative and postoperative care. The STOP or STOP Bang questionnaires are useful screening tests for OSA [2, 3]. Identification of patients at high risk may help to optimize the preoperative status and t...

BACKGROUND Patients with a mediastinal mass are at risk for cardiorespiratory complications in the perioperative period. The authors' objectives were to evaluate the incidence of life-threatening intraoperative cardiorespiratory and postoperative respiratory complications in adult patients and to study the usefulness of clinical signs and symptoms, radiologic evaluation, and pulmonary function ...

The publication of To Err Is Human in the USA and An Organisation with a Memory in the UK more than a decade ago put patient safety firmly on the clinical and policy agenda. To date, however, progress in improving safety and outcomes of hospitalized patients has been slower than the authors of these reports had envisaged. Here, we first review and analyse some of the reasons for the lack of evi...

BACKGROUND Acute β-blockade has been associated with poor perioperative outcomes in non-cardiac surgery patients, probably as a result of P-blocker-induced haemodynamic instability during the perioperative period, which has been shown to be more severe in hypertensive patients. OBJECTIVE To determine the impact of acute preoperative β-blockade on the incidence of perioperative cardiovascular ...

The United States spends more on health care than other nations, yet our health outcomes remain inferior to those of many countries. Change is therefore necessary. One approach to health care reform is to identify and eliminate practices associated with high cost and limited benefit. Recent research has shown that many perioperative practices meet this definition. An opportunity thus exists for...

For associate degree nursing students at Eastern Kentucky University, Richmond, the perioperative nursing clinical experience typically included a one-day observation of a surgical procedure, with students entering the OR suite after the surgery started and having to leave before the surgery was completed. An associate professor of nursing and a perioperative staff education coordinator partner...

Although bleeding is a common complication of surgery, routine laboratory tests have been demonstrated to have a low ability to predict perioperative bleeding. Better understanding of hemostatic function during surgery would lead to identification of high-risk patients for bleeding. Here, we aimed to elucidate hemostatic mechanisms to determine perioperative bleeding. We prospectively enrolled ...