Editor's Note On March 14, the Biden administration released a recommendation via the US Department of Veteran Affairs (VA) to restructure the VA healthcare system. OR Manager reported on the potential impact the recommended changes would have on VA services, which include older hospitals with unused inpatient beds being replaced…

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Editor's Note A December 2021 World Health Organization (WHO) report examines how 19 countries mitigated COVID-19’s effects on providing maternal; newborn; child and adolescent; and aging health services, JAMA Network March 15 reports. The WHO data comes from an initiative lasting from May 2020 to February 2021, during which groups…

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Editor's Note According to a March 14 news release from the National Institutes of Health (NIH), NIH’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) launched a Phase 1 clinical trial evaluating three experimental HIV vaccines using the messenger RNA (mRNA) technology. The mRNA technology being tested is the same…

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Editor's Note The AORN Guideline for Medical Device and Product Evaluation is now open for public comment. The public comment period will close on April 1.  This guideline, according to the AORN website, “provides guidance to perioperative team members for developing and implementing a process to evaluate US Food and…

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Editor's Note At the 2022 AORN Global Surgical Conference and Expo last week, AORN announced an update to its retained surgical items (RSI) guidance in a session presentation titled, “RSI Guideline, Update 2022,” led by Julie Cahn, DNP, RN, CNOR, RN-BC, ACNS-BC, CNS-CP, AORN senior perioperative practice specialist. This marks…

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Editor's Note According to the New York Times, which collected data from the US Department of Health and Human Services, COVID-19 cases have decreased nationwide in the last 2 weeks, Becker’s Hospital Review March 24 reports. However, the same data set shows that the number of COVID-19 cases have actually…

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Editor's Note On March 15, the FBI and Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) recommended all organizations take action to “enable, enforce, and properly configure” their multifactor authentication (MFA) protocols, the American Hospital Association (AHA) March 16 reports. Russian state-sponsored actors are reportedly exploiting known vulnerabilities in MFA protocols, including…

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Editor's Note This Canadian study finds that many cancers went undetected because of disruptions in the healthcare system in response to COVID-19. The week-to-week rate of diagnoses was steady before COVID-19, but fell 34.2% in March 2020, with only a slow recovery of 1% per week during the study period.…

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Editor's Note According to a March 16 Politico article, titled “Some hospitals ask patients, visitors to remove N95s, citing CDC,” some US hospitals are asking patients and visitors to swap their N95 masks with surgical masks or wear a surgical mask over the N95, Becker’s Hospital Review reports. The staff…

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Editor's Note In this study led by researchers at Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, New York City, increased age was found to be the greatest independent risk factor for COVID-19 associated mortality. Of 7,556 patients included in the analysis, 1,556 died, 949 were admitted to ICU, and 227…

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