Demographic Trends NEARLY half the patients admitted to general wards of hospitals today are over the age of 60 (Lancet, I963); the average age of patients admitted to Geriatric Units varies between 75 and 80, and in the Sunderland Geriatric Unit over onethird of all the admissions are over 80 years. The number of operations performed on patients of 60 and over (excluding orthopaedic and urolog...

OBJECTIVE Building surgical teams is one attempt to ensure the health-care system becomes more efficient, but how is 'efficiency' understood or interpreted? The aim was to study how organized surgical team members and their leaders understood operating room efficiency. DESIGN Qualitative study. SETTING A 1100-bed Swedish university hospital. PARTICIPANTS Eleven participants, nine team mem...

Careful treatment planning, space management, augmentation of bone and attention to the details of implant surgical and prosthetic techniques are important factors when treating anterior maxilla specially replacement of missing teeth. This case report addresses a chair-side ridge augmentation procedure using autograft bone harvested with trephine drills and placed without using screws and the f...

Implant therapy requires comprehensive preoperative planning and precise surgical execution based on a restorative-driven approach. Implant surgical demands in the esthetic zone require that the surgeon treating has extensive surgical experience in a variety of areas. Using a "team" approach to treat such cases allows the patient to receive care similar to the "medical model," in which each mem...

After an increase in methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus infections was discovered at a health care facility in Arizona, a multidisciplinary team convened to investigate the underlying problem and work toward eliminating surgical site infections. The team investigated environmental factors, held inservice sessions to reinforce sterile technique, and made important changes to the facilit...

Special Operations Forces need trauma surgical support that is flexible and rapidly mobile. Current operations in the Afghanistan Theater of Operations required the U.S. Army 772nd Forward Surgical Team (FST) to provide support for Special Operations missions and conventional missions on short-notice using its mobile Surgical Resuscitation Team (SRT). The 772nd FST's experience over a 15-month ...

Positioning the surgical patient requires special attention from the entire surgical team because anesthetized or sedated patients are not able to reposition themselves when needed to relieve discomfort or alert team members of the need for repositioning. Perioperative nurses must pay attention to positioning details and the possibility of injury at all times during the patient's procedure. Thi...

BACKGROUND Knowledge of the composition of a surgical team is the premise for studying efficiency inside the operating room. METHODS To investigate the team composition in general surgery procedures, we retrospectively reviewed procedures performed by an expert general surgeon in 2007-08 at 2 tertiary hospitals. For each patient, demographic characteristics, procedure type, team members and p...