Issue link: https://beckershealthcare.uberflip.com/i/1475102
18 PATIENT SAFETY & OUTCOMES Don't rush through surgical timeouts, medical groups warn By Mackenzie Bean T he Joint Commission and Association of periOperative Registered Nurses are urging surgical teams to not rush through safety "timeouts" as they tackle a backlog of surgeries postponed amid the pandemic. e timeouts are meant to prevent wrong- site surgeries and entail surgical teams pausing before an operation to confirm the correct procedure is about to be done on the correct part of the correct patient. "AORN has heard from members concerned that time outs in 2022 are being conducted hastily, likely as a result of surgical teams working through a backlog of operations postponed by the pandemic," AORN and e Joint Commission wrote in a joint statement released June 1. Travel nurses are also increasingly staffing operating rooms right now and may not feel comfortable speaking out about concerns, they said. Healthcare organizations must follow best practices and work to reduce the risk of wrong-site surgeries, which have significantly increased in the U.S. in the last three years, the groups said. e joint statement also offered actions administrators and surgical teams can take to improve timeout usage. n Physicians' race, gender influences white patients' treatment response, study suggests By Mackenzie Bean P atients' implicit biases about a physician's race and gender may influence their response to treatments, even when their overt attitudes about these providers are positive, according to a study published June 27 in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. For the study, researchers assessed the physiological responses of 187 white patients being treated for laboratory-induced allergic reactions. The patients were randomly assigned to interact with a male or female and Asian, Black or white healthcare provider who applied a placebo cream that patients were told would relieve the reaction. When female and Black providers applied the cream, patients' allergic reactions continued to increase at a greater rate than when applied by white, Asian and male providers. "Even when white patients' overt attitudes toward Black and women providers were positive, we found that they were less physiologically responsive to the treatment administered by these providers," researchers said. "These results illustrate how notions of race and gender can influence patients beneath the surface — literally under the skin — despite their professed intentions and even to their own detriment." More research is needed to understand how these race and gender dynamics play out over time, researchers said. n What physicians at Children's National Hospital learned from treating long COVID-19 patients By Erica Carbajal W hile fatigue is the most commonly reported symptom among adult and pediatric long COVID-19 patients, physicians at Washington, D.C.-based Children's National Hospital have noticed another pattern in pediatric patients. Speaking on how children's symptoms are different from adults, Alexandra Yonts, MD, an infectious disease specialist who runs the hospital's long COVID-19 clinic, told CBS News in a June 8 report, "Kids tend to have less respiratory complaints and more gastrointestinal symptoms." As of early June, Children's National Hospital was treating 70 long COVID-19 patients and is conducting a three- year study to learn more about the long-term effects children experience after a COVID-19 infection. Dr. Yonts told CBS that studies vary widely in the proportion of children who experience lingering symptoms. She estimates it could be as high as 10 percent. There have been more than 13 million confirmed COVID-19 cases among U.S. children since the start of the pandemic, according to the American Academy of Pediatrics. n