There is no shortage of advice, opinions, and proposed solutions when it comes to staff shortages, but the issue continues to plague healthcare systems nonetheless. For a couple of years now, speakers at the OR Business Management Conference and OR Manager Conference have been asking attendees, “Who still struggles to…

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Editor's Note COVID-19 can be considered endemic worldwide, The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) announced on the heels of reporting a drop in overall US death rates from the disease. CDC’s classification of the disease as endemic “means, essentially, that COVID is here to stay in predictable ways,”…

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Symptomatic SARS-COV-2 patients undergoing surgical procedures experience significantly higher 30-day in-hospital mortality, ICU admission, longer ICU and hospital stay, and pulmonary complications, according to a study published August 1 in the Journal of PeriAnesthesia Nursing. Researchers analyzed a year’s worth of records of 102 infected surgical patients and those who…

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Editor's Note A recent study led by the University of Bristol reveals nearly 9 months of joint replacement surgeries, amounting to approximately 160,000 procedures, have been lost since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, News Medical Life Sciences July 31 reports. Published in The Bone & Joint Journal, the study…

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Editor's Note Increased demand for anesthesia services, especially in non-operating room (non-OR) sites, has outpaced the growth of anesthesia clinicians, a June 2024 special article published by the journal Anesthesiology reports. The imbalance in the anesthesia workforce supply and demand, the article argues, was exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic and…

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Editor's Note COVID infections are rising nationally, with cases increasing in 39 states and none showing a decline, NBC news reported June 24. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) tracks Covid transmission through emergency department visits, which, along with deaths and hospitalizations, have recently increased, NBC reports. California…

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Editor's Note A nearly 2-year drop in global life expectancy from 2019 to 2021 indicates that the COVID-19 pandemic effectively erased decade of progress, according to The World Health Organization’s 2024 World Health Statistics report. According to May 24 Healio report on WHO’s findings, global life expectancy dropped by 1.8…

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Editor's Note A recent analysis from the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) of over 19 million hospital discharges in the US showed a significant decline in the quality of nonsurgical care for non-COVID-19 patients during the 2020 COVID-19 surges, Healthcare Purchasing News May 28 reports. Specifically, the study…

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Over 20 years ago, an article from Johns Hopkins published in The New England Journal of Medicine showed that Staphylococcus aureus decolonization of the nares can decrease risk of surgical site infections (SSI). Since then, nasal decolonization—the application of a topical antimicrobial or antiseptic agent to the nares—has been adopted…

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Editor's Note Only 46% of parents and 33% of teenagers believe receiving the latest COVID-19 vaccine was important, according to survey results presented by at a May 2-6 Pediatric Academic Societies Meeting in Toronto, Canada.   According to a May 9 Helio report on the findings, the survey is the…

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