Patient Safety Tip of the Week

April 9, 2007

Make Your Surgical Timeouts More Useful

We’ve often heard surgeons complain that they “waste” a lot of time doing surgical timeouts to prevent events that are very rare to start with. In fact, you can use surgical timeouts (either the pre-surgical timeout and/or the final verification timeout) to also focus on what are more common complications you wish to avoid. For example, use the timeout to ask questions such as following:

1. Is this patient getting prophylactic antibiotics? Who is giving them? When?
2. Is this patient a candidate for perioperative beta blockers? Did he get them?
3. Is this patient a candidate for DVT prophylaxis? Will it begin intraoperatively?
4. Will this patient need repositioning to avoid nerve compression or decubitus? If so, when?

Important update: See November 20, 2007 Patient Safety Tip of the Week "New Evidence Questions Perioperative Beta Blocker Use"

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