Better Care in the Operating Room

Excerpt

The last 100 years have witnessed great advances in medicine with respect to antibiotic therapy, blood transfusion, organ transplantation, and more recently stem cell therapies and fetal surgery. Certainly this rate of progress has served society well with regard to life expectancy and quality of life. However, the past 25 years have noticed a new cause of illness—that of medical harm. Current estimates suggest that one in ten patients are harmed through their healthcare journey [1]. This has led to an emerging field of patient safety, whereby we can and must do better. Surgery has been in the limelight, as up to two-thirds of medical harm affects surgical patients [2]. …