Surgery: Risk & Safety Overview

Course overview

In most instances, surgery is a very safe endeavor. Success in the OR is not, however, limited to the skill of the surgeon, although that plays an integral part in the success of the operation. The OR staff must form a team, and each member of the team must be allowed to play his or her role. There are systems at work in the OR within which each team member functions. The failure to allow the systems to work as originally envisioned can lead to patient injury and liability. As a class, surgeons tend to be sued regularly for various outcomes that deviated from what was anticipated at the outset. It has been estimated that approximately 80 surgical never events occurred each week between 1990 and 2010; these tend to fall into certain categories that repeat themselves over and over again. In this activity, we review cases and litigation related to informed consent, wrong-site/wrong-patient/wrong-procedure surgery, retained foreign bodies, and avoiding surgical complications. After completing this activity, practitioners should be able to: identify the essential information that must be disclosed in order to obtain valid informed consent; identify the steps that must be taken prior to initiating a surgical procedure; and identify the key steps in the process to ensure that foreign bodies are not retained following surgery.