Pharmacists working with surgical teams bring distinct safety context, expertise, and process awareness to perioperative care. These guidelines outline how pharmacists can help reduce medication errors before, during, and after surgery. Perioperative pharmacists can enhance communication, medication histories, and process reliability.

Surgical site infections are a persistent and costly challenge to patient safety. These guidelines provide recommendations to reduce this common hospital-acquired condition, including policies for surgeon attire, hand hygiene, and equipment sterilization.

This scientific statement from the American Heart Association (AHA) reviews the current state of knowledge on safety issues in the operating room (OR) and provides detailed recommendations for hospitals to implement to improve safety and patient outcomes. These recommendations include using checklists and formal handoff protocols for every procedure, teamwork training and other approaches to enhance safety culture, applying human factors engineering principles to optimize OR design and minimize fatigue, and taking steps to discourage disruptive behavior by clinicians. AHA scientific statements, which are considered the standard of care for cardiac patients, have traditionally focused on clinical issues, but this article (and an earlier statement on medication error prevention) illustrates the critical importance of ensuring safety in this complex group of patients.

This guideline describes recommendations for preoperative assessment of elderly surgical patients, including risk factors for postoperative delirium and pulmonary complications, to enhance safety and reduce readmissions.

This guidance statement outlines recommendations from the Association of periOperative Registered Nurses (AORN) for developing, implementing, and evaluating safe medication practices in the perioperative environment.

This article provides guidelines for ensuring quality in surgical and autopsy pathology, including identifying and correcting errors.

This revision of the 2006 committee statement provides a series of recommendations responding to issues that contribute to errors within the operative theater and highlights checklists as one approach to improvement.