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The perioperative setting is a high-risk environment. This continuing education model discusses safety threats and evidence-based best practices to deliver nursing care in perioperative settings and promote a culture of safety.

UK Regulators measure never events to assess hospital safety culture and dictate reimbursement. The authors suggest that regulators focus on reducing the national never event rate through shared learning and an integrated system-wide approach, rather than concentrating on underperforming, outlier hospitals where factors such as safety culture maybe contributing to increased rates of never events.

Using a Safety-II framework, the authors used a mixed-methods approach to retrospectively analyze root cause analysis (RCA) reports of ‘never events’ occurring in the United Kingdom to characterize proposed actions, insights and recommendations to prevent future events. The analysis found that proposed actions were generally of low-to-moderate effectiveness, and that despite identifying systems challenges and weaknesses, many reports did not include proposed actions to mitigate or remove risks. The authors conclude that applying concepts from resilient healthcare can identify vulnerabilities and opportunities for strengthening the RCA system and improving the quality of RCA reports.

Despite large-scale efforts to prevent wrong-site surgeries, they continue to occur. This concept analysis found limited evidence regarding the role of nurses in wrong-site surgery and recommends that future research focus on theoretical frameworks around how preoperative nurses can help avert these never events.

Perioperative nurses identified wrong-site surgery and medication errors as the most pressing patient safety concerns in their area of practice.

This study combined implementation of verification protocols with periodic audits and feedback to increase compliance with patient identification in the prevention of wrong-patient and wrong-site surgery. While the process did improve, the authors advocate for technological solutions to address the limitations of purely manual systems. A related commentary [see link below] discusses the broader context of efforts to eliminate wrong-site surgery.

This article discusses the reasons for utilizing the Joint Commission Universal Protocol for time outs and describes a process for implementing its use.