Too loud to hear myself think: deleterious effects of noise in the operating room.

Noise is part of daily life in the operating room, and too often is viewed as a necessary evil. However, much of the noise in operating rooms (ORs) is unnecessary, such as extraneous conversations and music, and could be reduced. At the least, noise is known to increase staff stress and to hamper effective communication; at the worst, it adversely affects patient outcomes.

The Cognitive Basis for Human Error and the Best Practices to Reduce Error.

A great deal of knowledge exists about how to make health care safer than it is currently. The tools exist but all too often, they are not implemented. All anesthesia providers need to understand what safety best practices are and continue to advocate for them in their workplaces.

Does standardisation improve post-operative anaesthesia handoffs? Meta-analyses on provider, patient, organisational, and handoff outcomes.

Anaesthesia handoffs are associated with negative outcomes (e.g. inappropriate treatments, post-operative complications, and in-hospital mortality).

A rose by any other name would smell as sweet: defining patient safety-related terminology.

The definitions of terms related to iatrogenic harm and the potential for iatrogenic harm (e.g. error, medication error, near miss) in the anaesthesia literature are imprecise and variable, resulting in wide discrepancy in conclusions about their rates and potential solutions.

Implementation and 1-year follow-up of the cardiovascular ICU standardised handover.

Background: Miscommunication during clinical handover can lead to partial information transfer and healthcare provider dissatisfaction. We hypothesised that a quality improvement project to standardise the cardiovascular intensive care unit (CVICU) handover could improve healthcare provider satisfaction and reduce information omission.

Methods: After institutional review board approval, the operating room (OR) to CVICU handover was audited prior, post and 1 year after standardisation implementation.