This expert guidance provides recommendations to help health care facilities develop policies for preventing health care–associated infections in the operating room. The authors build on existing anesthesia safety practices to outline specific actions for infection prevention and control.

Communication failures in the operating room are a patient safety issue, and knowing other team members' names may help reduce hierarchies that contribute to errors. Introductions are the first step in the surgical time-out in the World Health Organization Surgical Safety Checklist. However, this study—conducted in the operating rooms of three teaching hospitals—suggests that team members often do not know each other's names and may not view introductions as important for maintaining safety.

… Journal of infection and public health … J Infect Public Health … Major efforts have focused on …

This expert guidance provides recommendations to help hospitals develop policies to reduce the spread of health care–associated infections by individuals visiting patients in isolation. The authors discuss contact precautions and outline specific conditions where these suggestions should be employed.

This simulation study examined how residents respond to postoperative deterioration in the surgical ward. Residents improved in validated assessments of clinical performance, teamwork, and communication with patients compared to before the simulation. This work underscores the importance of simulation in patient safety education across multiple clinical settings.

Hand hygiene rates remain disappointingly low among physicians and nurses, despite appropriate handwashing being an essential factor in preventing health care–associated infections. In this study, installing a hand sanitizer dispenser on the anesthesia machine resulted in only a limited increase in the frequency of hand sanitization by anesthesiologists.

This randomized trial found that a protocol requiring anesthesiologists to wear two pairs of sterile gloves during intubations—with the outer pair removed immediately afterward—was associated with a lower rate of operating room contamination.

… Journal of interprofessional care … J Interprof Care … Utilizing social media as a strategy to …

This guidance examined literature and hospital policies around how health care staff clothing can contribute to health care–associated infections (HAIs). The investigators reveal patients' and health care workers' perceptions regarding clinician attire and recommend research to improve understanding about its potential to spread pathogens.

… Jt Comm J Qual Patient Saf … Jt Comm J Qual Patient Saf … This commentary describes how a …

This review of teamwork training programs identifies several effective programs, but also notes problems that have been identified in prior research, including a lack of detailed evaluation of the programs’ effect on behavior change and long-term outcomes.

This article provides an overview of debriefing as a learning tool in critical incident analysis and in clinical situations such as the operating room. Practical suggestions are provided to enable hospital leadership and team leaders to maximize the utility of debriefing sessions.

In this study, researchers evaluated the culture of safety in pediatric cardiac surgery teams by using a survey based on the Safety Attitudes Questionnaire. Overall, teamwork was rated relatively low, similar to prior research analyzing operating room safety culture.

… Journal of Patient Safety … J Patient Saf … This article discusses how an organization …

Crew resource management methods, initially developed in aviation, have been proposed as a means to reduce human errors in medicine through improved teamwork and communication. In this cluster-randomized trial, physicians and nurses on obstetrics wards underwent teamwork training based on the MedTeams model, which has been previously studied in the emergency department. The intervention did not result in improvement in patient (maternal or fetal) clinical outcomes or in the delivery of appropriate process measures. The authors ascribe this negative result to problems noted in other cluster-randomized trials of quality improvement interventions, such as inadequate time to implement the intervention, a relatively short follow-up period, and baseline variation between hospitals in the incidence of adverse events.