Optimal Resources For Surgical Quality And Safety

This book focuses exclusively on the surgical patient and on the perioperative environment with its unique socio-technical and cultural issues. It covers preoperative, intraoperative, and postoperative processes and decision making and explores both sharp-end and latent factors contributing to harm and poor quality outcomes. It is intended to be a resource for all healthcare practitioners that interact with the surgical patient. This book provides a framework for understanding and addressing many of the organizational, technical, and cultural aspects of care to one of the most vulnerable patients in the system, the surgical patient. The first section presents foundational principles of safety science and related social science. The second exposes barriers to achieving optimal surgical outcomes and details the various errors and events that occur in the perioperative environment. The third section contains prescriptive and proactive tools and ways to eliminate errors and harm. The final section focuses on developing continuous quality improvement programs with an emphasis on safety and reliability. Surgical Patient Care: Improving Safety, Quality and Value targets an international audience which includes all hospital, ambulatory and clinic-based operating room personnel as well as healthcare administrators and managers, directors of risk management and patient safety, health services researchers, and individuals in higher education in the health professions. It is intended to provide both fundamental knowledge and practical information for those at the front line of patient care. The increasing interest in patient safety worldwide makes this a timely global topic. As such, the content is written for an international audience and contains materials from leading international authors who have implemented many successful programs.

In general, surgeons strive to achieve excellent results and ideal patient outcomes, however, this noble task is frequently failed. For patients, surgical complications are analogous to “friendly fire” in wartime. Both scenarios imply that harm is unintentionally done by somebody whose aim was to help. Interestingly, adverse events resulting from surgical interventions are more frequently related to system errors and a communication breakdown among providers, rather than to the imminent threat of the surgical blade “gone wrong”. Patient Safety in Surgery aims to increase the safety and quality of care for patients undergoing surgical procedures in all fields of surgery. Patient Safety in Surgery, covers all aspects related to patient safety in surgery, including pertinent issues of interest to surgeons, medical trainees (students, residents, and fellows), nurses, anaesthesiologists, patients, patient families, advocacy groups, and medicolegal experts.​ ​​

This issue of Surgical Clinics of North America focuses on Rural Surgery and is edited by Dr. Tyler G. Hughes. Articles will include: Status of the rural workplace: Hospital survival and economics; Rural standards and the quality equation; Scope of practice of the rural surgeon; Advanced technology and the rural surgeon; Qualitative research in rural surgery; Perioperative support in the rural surgery world; Initial and ongoing training of the rural surgeon; Demographics in rural populations; Dealing with the sick rural surgery patient in need of transfer; National quality projects and patient selection decisions; Status of the rural surgical workforce; Regionalization of rural surgery; and more!

While the healthcare system continues to shift towards more emphasis on quality metrics, there remains a substantial gap between the expectations of healthcare policies and standards of hospital administrations vs. the realistic care provided by the average healthcare provider. This book offers the perspective of the healthcare provider and aims to fulfill the unmet need to educate other healthcare providers on recognizing quality measures and understanding how to achieve them to meet standards of quality care. This book covers the historical perspective of quality measures, the context of their existence, their utility, and the contemporary issues related to their use. Simultaneously, it critically addresses the quality of these quality metrics and presents the evidence available to date on the efficacy and the limitations of these quality measures. This text is all-inclusive and is organized into chapters that include the evolution of quality metrics in healthcare, the practical role of hospitals, as well as the practical role of individual healthcare providers in addressing quality metrics. The chapters also include assessment of quality metrics that uniquely pertain to medical and surgical practices, as well as non-clinical quality metrics that specifically target undergraduate and graduate medical training. Finally, the book reflects on the use of contemporary quality metrics and their impact on outcomes, patient care, and public health and policy making. In these chapters, tables and illustrations, including algorithms, will be used to provide systematic approaches to common issues related to quality metrics. In addition, historical anecdotes and case presentations will be used to address pearls in contemporary practice of quality metrics. Quality Measures is the definitive reference on quality metrics in healthcare and is a valuable resource for healthcare providers, trainees, administrators and public health agencies.

This book teaches the theories and concepts behind surgical quality improvement and explains the skills and traits needed to become a high quality provider. The editors aim to teach and inspire the reader to achieve high quality outcomes and strive for continuous improvement.

This textbook is divided in to eight units as follows: Unit 1: Operating Suite; Unit 2: Education and Training; Unit 3: Holding Area/ Receiving Area; Unit 4: Peri-Operative Care: Unit 4: Care of Patients; Unit 5: Post-Operative; Unit 6: Communication; Unit 7: Safety in Operating Rooms; Unit 8: Post-Anesthesia Care Unit (PACU)/ Recovery Room (RR). This text book is a very unique guide to implement the national and international healthcare accreditation standards in the Operating Rooms and Post-Anesthesia Care Unit for providing the best quality healthcare services for the excellent outcomes and patient safety.