Resiliency and proactive safety behaviors can improve safety in the perioperative environment. In this article, the authors describe safety attitudes of perioperative staff after participating in a proactive activity, One Safe Act (OSA). Most participants reported the OSA activity would change their work practices, improve their work unit's ability to deliver safe care, and demonstrate their colleagues' commitment to patient safety.

Normalization of deviance refers to the wide adoption of poor practices despite associated safety hazards. This article discusses how normalization of deviance threatens high-reliability and outline strategies to mitigate normalization of deviance in operating rooms (ORs).

Wrong-site, wrong-procedure, and wrong-patient errors (WSPEs) are serious adverse events. This retrospective analysis of medical liability claims data examined the incidence of WSPEs in France between 2007 and 2017. During this ten-year period, WSPEs accounted for 0.4% of all claims. Procedures on the wrong organ were most common (44%), followed by wrong side (39%), wrong person (13%) and wrong procedure (4%). The researchers found that the average number of WSPEs decreased after implementation of a surgical checklist.

Failure to rescue refers to delayed or missed recognition of a potentially fatal complication that results in a patient’s death. This single-center study sought to more effectively manage deteriorating patients after emergency surgery and reduce failure to rescue rates. Researchers used the functional resonance analysis method (FRAM) to develop recommendations for strengthening organizational resilience. Recommendations included improving team communication, organizational learning, and relationships.

This three-part series offers an in-depth look into the core values of honesty, transparency, and trust. Part 1, Promoting Professionalism, introduces interventions to increase provider professionalism. Part 2, Communication and Transparency, describes the commitment to honesty and transparency across the continuum of the patient-provider relationship. Part 3, Health Professional Wellness, describes the impact of harm on providers and offers recommendations for restoring wellness and joy in work.

The World Health Organization (WHO) Surgical Safety Checklist has been implemented in healthcare systems around the world. This systematic review and thematic analysis concluded that the surgical safety checklist positively impacts clinical outcomes (surgical outcomes and mortality), process measures, team dynamics, and communication, as well as safety culture. The authors note that the checklist was negatively associated with efficiency and workload; included studies often noted that checklist users felt the checklist slowed down processes within the operating room

An essential part of resident training is error recovery- recognizing an error has occurred and strategizing how to correct the error to maximize patient safety. Through interviews with surgical residents, barriers and facilitators to experience error recovery were supervision, self, surgical context, and situation safeness. Focusing on these factors may enhance residents’ ability to develop their error recovery skills.

Prior research identified variability in perioperative safety culture by provider type and experience. This study found that perioperative nurse engagement (e.g., energy, dedication, resilience) and perioperative nurse certification were significantly associated with self-reported safety culture in the operating room, but length of perioperative nurse experience was not.

Checklists are widely used strategies for error reduction and improved communication. This editorial discusses the limitations of checklists for perioperative safety (i.e., when used in isolation or implemented incorrectly) and suggests that safety initiatives taking a systems-oriented approach and organizational buy-in can lead to both perioperative and general safety improvements.

TeamSTEPPS is a patient safety intervention designed to improve teamwork and communication in healthcare settings. One Norwegian hospital utilized TeamSTEPPS to improve professional and organizational outcomes in the urology and gastrointestinal surgery ward. Twelve months after implementation, researchers observed sustained improvements in three patient safety culture dimensions and three teamwork dimensions. Further studies with larger same size and stronger study designs are warranted.

Debriefing is an established strategy teams use to learn from critical events, reduce event occurrence, and improve failure response. This review examines how debriefing principles can be embedded for use of the practice in real time, rather than developed in simulated circumstances, to improve anesthesia safety.

The anesthesia community has been a leader in patient safety innovation for over four decades. This conference summary highlights presented content related to the conference theme of “preventing, detecting, and mitigating clinical deterioration in the perioperative period.” The results of a human-centered design analysis exploring tactics to reduce failure to rescue were summarized.

Incident reporting systems are central to most patient safety programs, but studies have identified barriers to effective use. This study used clinical vignettes describing a medication error or near miss to explore error awareness and attitudes towards reporting and disclosure among anesthesiologists. Approximately one-third of anesthesiologists recalled having had medication safety training. Perioperative medication error awareness and assessment of potential harm were variable, and the likelihood of patient disclosure and incident reporting was low. Education programs utilizing vignettes should be utilized to raise awareness about error reporting and disclosure behaviors.  

This article describes the use of a new accident analysis technique (CAST, or Causal Analysis based on Systems Theory), an alternative approach to root cause analysis. The CAST approach is based on the principle that accidents are not only the result of individual system component failures or errors but more generally result due to inadequate enforcement of constraints on the behavior of the system components (i.e., safety constraints enforced by controls, such as checklists).  Many adverse events (AEs) appear to be related to the design of the system involved and not attributable to unsafe individual behavior. This technique can be useful in identifying causal factors to help health care systems learn from mistakes and design systems-level changes to prevent future AEs.

Employing a mixed-methods approach, this study found that teamwork (directly and indirectly) positively impacted professionals’ safety behavior. Teamwork indirectly impacted safety behavior by increasing individual’s positive psychological capital, thereby increasing their self-efficacy and resilience. These findings emphasize the role of hospital leadership and middle management in creating an organizational culture of safety

This integrative review examined the factors contributing to perioperative adverse events resulting from anesthesia. Researchers found that both active errors, such as medication errors or inattention, and latent errors, such as communication failures, contributed to adverse events.

The authors describe the results of a survey of anesthesiology chiefs designed to understand their perceptions of the Veterans Health Administration efforts surrounding the lessons learned process for adverse events occurring in anesthesia. Of participants who had been aware of lessons learned, 90% shared them with staff and 75% described changing or reinforcing safety behaviors.