best practice not followed

[immortalsong]

Have there been any issues or area in your operating room where standard best practice is not being followed? I just started in the OR and noticed nobody labels their water and and saline or some people prep their gyne in different ways. I'm sure there are many more and ask what kind of things you have notice that nurses should be doing but not doing.

[Rose_Queen, BSN, MSN, RN]

Not labeling saline and water is something that can get the facility dinged by The Joint Commission. Is it your place to try to correct it? As a new hire, not really, but you can report it/phrase it as a question with the educator. That might lead to some department-wide reinforcement of the policy. As for performing gyn preps in different ways, are any of them in violation of the written policy? It could just be the way they were taught how to do the prep.

As for the biggest not following best practices in my facility, that would probably be OR traffic. We have some ORs that are so small they don't allow for the scrub person to enter through the sub room door while not contaminating their hand scrub. Instead, they enter through the front "patient transport only" door. We also have a lot of people coming into other rooms just to chat. There's a big difference to opening a door for the purpose of assisting people in the case (bringing extra instruments/supplies or offering breaks) and opening a door for nonessential reasons.