New Wrong-Site Surgery Prevention Toolkit Gaining in Popularity

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New Wrong-Site Surgery Prevention Toolkit Gaining in Popularity

ASC Quality Collaboration introduced the safety resource last December

ASCs are improving their delivery of safe care with the extensive resources included in the prevention of wrong-site surgery toolkit developed by the ASC Quality Collaboration (ASCQC), says Becky Ziegler-Otis, CASC, assistant executive director. ASCQC made the toolkit available on its website last month. The complementary toolkit comprises many ASC-focused resources, including guidelines, assessment tools, training materials and monitoring tools. ASCQC membership organizations and healthcare authorities, like the World Health Organization, American Society for Health Care Risk Management and Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, contributed some of the resources.

The ASCQC chose to focus on wrong-site surgery for several reasons, Ziegler-Otis says. One of the required measures for the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services' Ambulatory Surgical Center Quality Reporting Program is wrong-site surgery, making this a measure that is routinely tracked by ASCs, she says. ASCQC also tracks and reports the incidence of this event through its quarterly benchmarking program.

“Our tracking has demonstrated that the incidence of a ‘wrong surgery’ in the ASC environment, whether it concerns the site, side, patient, procedure or implant, is low,” Ziegler-Otis says. "However, the impact on patient care, their family members, as well as the center itself when a wrong surgery occurs is significant. Putting together a toolkit focused on wrong-site surgery prevention aligns with the ASCQC’s mission to provide ASCs with valuable resources that can be used to foster safe, high-quality care.”

Ziegler-Otis encourages ASCs to explore how the resources in the wrong-site surgery prevention toolkit can be implemented into their existing wrong surgery prevention approaches. “Centers may find it worthwhile to use the resources to further enhance their policies and strategies aimed at ensuring a wrong surgery does not affect their patients.”

The new toolkit includes the wrong surgery reporting guidance document that ASCQC recently developed to enhance consistent reporting of these events. It adds to ASCQC’s existing collection of patient safety toolkits available on its website, ascquality.org.