Women in healthcare in Imperial Russia: The contribution of the surgeon Nikolay I Pirogov.

Nikolay Ivanovich Pirogov, one of the greatest Russian surgeons of the 19th Century, was convinced of the importance of deploying nurses to care for the casualties of war. With the support of Grand Duchess Elena Pavlovna, sister-in-law of Tsar Nikolas I, Pirogov realised the idea during the Crimean war when Russia became the first country to send female nurses to the battle front. Later in the 19th century, large numbers of Russian women trained as nurses under the auspices of the Russian Red Cross, founded in 1867.

Influence of latent risk factors on job satisfaction, job stress and intention to leave in anaesthesia teams: a cross-sectional survey.

Context: Current thinking about patient safety emphasises the causal relationship between working conditions, referred to as latent risk factors (LRFs), and the quality of clinical care.

Objective: To investigate the extent to which LRFs are related to job satisfaction, job stress and intention to leave for specialist anaesthetists, trainee anaesthetists and nurse anaesthetists. We expected the different members of the anaesthesia team to show differing perceptions of LRFs, and differences in predictive LRFs for well-being.

Patient safety in the operating room: an intervention study on latent risk factors.

Background: Patient safety is one of the greatest challenges in healthcare. In the operating room errors are frequent and often consequential. This article describes an approach to a successful implementation of a patient safety program in the operating room, focussing on latent risk factors that influence patient safety.

Redesign of a university hospital preanesthesia evaluation clinic using a queuing theory approach.

Background: Changes in patient length of stay (the duration of 1 clinic visit) as a result of the introduction of an electronic patient file system forced an anesthesia department to change its outpatient clinic organization. In this study, we sought to demonstrate how the involvement of essential employees combined with mathematical techniques to support the decision-making process resulted in a successful intervention.

Methods: The setting is the preanesthesia evaluation clinic (PAC) of a university hospital, where patients consult several medical professionals, either by walk-in or appointment.

A comparison of US, UK, and Dutch perioperative staffing practices.

American nurses developed the profession of the perioperative RN. Lasting personnel shortages led to the creation of the position of surgical technologist, however, and the necessity of having an RN in the OR has been under scrutiny in the United States and United Kingdom. The Netherlands had a different historical development of perioperative professions, resulting in ORs largely staffed by technicians.