Wrong-site surgery is considered a never event and can lead to serious patient harm. This analysis of closed medical malpractice claims on wrong-site surgery between 2013 and 2020 concluded that the risk of wrong-site surgery increases with spinal surgeries (e.g., spinal fusion, excision of intervertebral discs). The primary contributing factors to wrong-site surgery was failure to follow policy or protocols (such as failure to follow the Universal Protocol) and failure to review medical records.

Inpatient falls are a common patient safety event and can have serious consequences. This study used hospital safety reporting system data to characterize falls in perioperative settings. Falls represented 1% of all safety reports between 2014 and 2020 and most commonly involved falls from a bed or stretcher. The author suggests strategies to identify patients at high risk for falls, improve fall-related training for healthcare personnel, and optimize equipment design in perioperative areas to prevent falls.

Incident reporting systems are used to detect patient safety concerns and determine potential causes and opportunities for improvements. In the perioperative setting of one hospital, insufficient handoffs were the most common event type in the “coordination of care” category. Use of structured handoffs is recommended to improve communication and patient safety.

… communication between patients and providers. … Ranum D, Beverly A, Shapiro FE, et al. Leading causes of …

Harm from opioids is a widely recognized patient safety issue, and potential harm associated with short-term use is a growing area of concern. This analysis of a previously opioid-free surgical population identified a high rate of potential opioid-related adverse drug events (ORADEs); risk was strongly associated with route and duration of post-operative opioid administration. The presence of an ORADE was associated with longer postoperative length of stay, higher hospitalization costs, lower odds of discharge home, and higher odds of death.

Office-based surgery is increasingly common, despite concerns regarding its safety. This review summarizes the literature on ambulatory surgery outcomes and identified risk factors such as case complexity, patient comorbidities, and anesthesia use. Few studies examined anesthesia use in dental care.

Ambulatory surgery centers are increasingly utilized to provide surgical care to patients. Quality improvement approaches utilized in the inpatient setting may need to be modified or adapted to be applicable in the ambulatory surgery environment. Researchers describe efforts to implement a surgical safety checklist and infection control techniques across 665 ambulatory surgery centers recruited for the study. They identified several barriers and conclude that the unique aspects of ambulatory surgery centers must be taken into account when implementing quality improvement initiatives.

Closed claim analysis can identify care problems and inform improvement strategies. This review examined closed claims for anesthesia and identified types of injuries experienced by patients receiving anesthesia. Situational awareness, distractions, equipment problems, and pain medicine complications contributed to anesthesia malpractice claims.

Recent efforts to address the opioid crisis include developing prescribing guidelines and changing policy. This review suggests that including a morphine milligram equivalent on opioid labels could reduce the potential for prescription-related harm. A PSNet perspective discussed opioid misuse as a patient safety problem.

This retrospective study of the National Anesthesia Clinical Outcomes Registry database determined that complications were more common for procedures performed in the operating room compared to procedures performed outside the operating room. This finding may be due to adverse selection, in which patients at higher risk for complications are intentionally treated in the operating room environment. A past WebM&M commentary discussed an adverse event related to a procedure at an outpatient center.

Procedures are increasingly performed in the outpatient setting, but little is known about how elements of ambulatory surgery centers and office facilities impact patient experience and safety. This systematic review found no evidence to support a difference in the safety of procedures performed in office-based settings versus ambulatory surgery centers. The authors suggest that further research is needed to understand how specific facility characteristics such as accreditation may affect safety.

Opioid prescriptions for chronic, noncancer pain have contributed to the national opioid epidemic. Malpractice claims can identify trends in patient hazards and have been previously employed to better elucidate the opioid risks. This retrospective observational study examined all closed claims from a large malpractice carrier levied against pain medicine physicians. The resulting sample included 37 cases. Researchers found that improper medication management was the most common reason for a claim and only 27% resulted in payment. No claim filed when a provider terminated opioid therapy resulted in payment. Most of the patients who died in this study had cardiac, pulmonary, or psychiatric comorbidities. The authors recommend adhering to opioid prescribing guidelines, communicating opioid prescribing risks to patients, documenting those conversations, and monitoring for diversion as strategies to reduce malpractice claims. An Annual Perspective summarized opioid-related patient safety research.

… climate. … Pimentel MPT, Choi S, Fiumara K, Kachalia A, Urman RD. Safety Culture in the Operating Room: Variability …

Checklists have been highlighted as useful tools for nurses and physicians to improve communication and reduce care omissions. This commentary describes the development of a customizable checklist template designed to enable patients to engage in their care and safety.

The recent death of comedienne Joan Rivers, which followed a cardiac arrest during a routine throat procedure, has brought national attention to the potential safety hazards of office-based procedural anesthesia. This retrospective study examined adverse events associated with moderate procedural sedation performed outside of the operating room at a tertiary medical center. Adverse events were relatively rare, with only 52 safety incidents identified out of more than 140,000 cases over an 8-year period. The most common harm was oversedation leading to apnea and requiring the use of reversal agents or prolonged bag-mask ventilation. Women were found to be at particularly increased risk for adverse events including oversedation and hypotension. These findings suggest that a combination of patient and procedural characteristics may help risk stratify patients, allowing for appropriate responses such as increased monitoring and staffing for patients likely to experience sedation-related complications. A previous AHRQ WebM&M perspective described office-based anesthesia as the "Wild West" of patient safety.

Office-based anesthesia has become more widely performed, despite a paucity of studies evaluating mortality and morbidity associated with the practice. This review proposes that increased use of office-based anesthesia will result in improved techniques and anesthetics for the ambulatory environment, enhancing safety and informing regulations for such procedures.

Checklists are an important patient safety intervention in surgery, but existing research has examined their effectiveness only for hospital-based procedures. Although the rate of serious errors in office-based procedures is likely fairly low, safety practices are not standardized in this setting. This survey found that only half of offices performing procedures (which included plastic surgery, gastroenterology, gynecology, and dentistry offices) utilized any type of safety checklist. The main barriers to using checklists were lack of a regulatory mandate and insufficient evidence supporting their effectiveness in this area. A past AHRQ WebM&M commentary discussed a serious error that occurred after a liposuction procedure performed in a plastic surgery office.

Highlighting the lack of standard oversight for office-based anesthesia, this review recommends accreditation as a method to augment safety in this setting.

This commentary discusses how use of a checklist can improve safety of office-based surgeries.

This narrative review explores how the practice of office-based anesthesia has increased and discusses the need for uniform regulations and accreditation to improve patient outcomes.