Objective
To summarize the characteristics of surgery-related near misses including events composition, cause of incident, specialty category, personnel allocation etc, and to provide experience of feedforward control for the nurses in operating room and a clinical basis of safety standards for the management of operating rooms.
Method
The 240 surgery-related near misses occurred between July 2014 and July 2016 were retrospectively analyzed, using frequencies and percentiles to describe the count data.
Results
The 240 surgery-related near misses were mainly associated with surgical stitches (91 cases, 37.9%), surgical dressings (52 cases, 21.7%) and surgical instruments (45 cases, 18.8%). The main features of the 91 cases of surgical stitching included loss of suture needles (40.7%, 37/91) and fracture events (37.4%, 34/91). Among the 52 cases of surgical dressings, the most commonly were gauze dressing events (43 cases, 82.7%), in which 19 were with unclear numbers of retained gauzes in the reoperation patient’s body, and 15 were postoperative counting anomalies. Among the 45 cases of surgical instruments, the fracture and defect were the most common (21 cases, 46.7%).
Conclusion
The operation nurses should focus on the prevention of suture needle loss, the surgical dressings loss and the fracture and defect of surgical instruments, etc, to reduce or avoid the surgery-related near misses.
