Checklists are Promoting Safer Standards in US Hospitals Travel nurse jobs give R.N.s the distinct advantage of exposure to a wide variety of charting systems, familiarizing many with what has today become a popular practice in surgical jobs: making checklists. Surgical checklists are creating a sizeable dip in errors and patient mortality—and it’s not just their content changing patient outcomes and hospital efficiency for the better—it’s also the teamwork required from everyone on the surgical team committed to seeing checklists work. Borrowing a strategy from the aviation industry, healthcare is also using teamwork and briefings, to improve safety and efficiency during operations. Surgical checklists are a component in this, so effective they are becoming a new standard in healthcare; even the most highly regarded US hospitals are improving thanks to checklists. Surgical checklists document every step of a patient’s surgery and hospitalization, from admission to discharge, and are reducing the risk of dying after surgery and suffering other types of complications. In one study that addressed a pool of 7,600 patients, surgical checklists decreased mortality by half and morbidity by one-third; these statistics were generated in six different Netherlands hospitals, on 11 separate checklists comprised of [+]

Answering calls for faster, more convenient service in an outpatient setting, hospital systems, big and small, are branching out into the outpatient surgery business. Margins on outpatient surgeries are superior to inpatient counterparts – sometimes by as much as 20 percent, which could lead to a spike in travel nurse jobs in hospital-based surgery centers in select markets. Growing from about 240 outpatient surgery centers in 1983 to about 5,000 today, the Wall Street Journal reports that 65 percent of all surgeries in the U.S. don’t require an overnight hospital stay, compared to 16 percent in 1980. Minimally invasive techniques, improvements in anesthesia, smaller incisions and less blood loss have all enabled outpatient surgery to gain a stronghold at U.S. hospitals. In addition, financial incentives for hospitals to shift to less complex surgeries amid rising health care costs and changes in Medicare and insurance reimbursements has encouraged the development of both freestanding outpatient surgery centers, as well as hospital-based surgery centers in all 50 states. Opportunities for operating room techs, med/surg nurses, ER nurses and advanced nurse practitioners are expected to be abundant in coming years, as in addition to medically needed surgeries, the popularity of [+]