Using Safety Tools to Prevent System-Related Errors

Abstract

s exemplified in this year’s theme, “Reaching the Peak of Perioperative Practice: Safety, Quality, Collaboration,” ensuring patient safety is one of the most important roles of the perioperative nurse. Perioperative nurses advocate for patients during one of the most vulnerable times in their lives. As nurses, it is our ethical responsibility to ensure optimal patient outcomes and prevent harmful errors from occurring. Unfortunately, wrong site surgery and other preventable errors still occur too frequently in US operating rooms. In fact, wrong site surgery is the mostreported sentinel event. As humans, we will make mistakes. By the nature of our work in the OR, we must commit to memory thousands of pieces of information to be processed and analyzed when caring for our patients, and forgetting one step can mean the difference between life and death. Wachter and Shojania have written,