Studying What Happens in the OR

Abstract

Despite significant attention from both the healthcare community and the population at large, limited improvements have been made in patient safety over the last decade. Given the frequency with which adverse events occur in surgery, and in the operating room in particular, this is a critical area to target for improvements. Traditional quantitative retrospective approaches to research are limited in their ability to advance this field. For this reason, we must expand our armamentarium to include research at the point of care. In this chapter, we will present an overview of the available approaches to data collection and analysis as well as the critical steps to performing this type of research. We will also discuss several representative research studies focusing on point-of-care research in the operating room.