Operating Room Nursing and Malpractice

Operating rooms are places where advanced technological tools and equipment are used, various surgical techniques and methods are applied, and teamwork and making the right decisions quickly are important. Operating room nurses have important duties such as creating the necessary conditions for the environment where the operation will be performed, preparing the instruments and equipment before the operation, preparing the patient, performing and terminating the operation, and following the maintenance, cleaning, and sterilization of the instruments and equipment after the operation. Excessive workload, an insufficient number of staff, ambiguities in roles, long working hours, inadequate wages, working in a shift system, poor communication with health-care team members, and problems related to the management approach of managers reduce motivation and cause medical errors. The Joint Commission on Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations defines malpractice as damage to the patient as a result of inappropriate and unethical behavior of health-care professionals and inadequate and negligent behavior in professional practices. When we look at the undesirable events that operating room nurses may encounter: incomplete or incorrect transmission of information about the patient during patient transfer from the operating room to the clinic, cutting and piercing instrument injuries, wrong side surgery, forgetting a foreign body, surgical electrocautery burns, urinary catheter-related infections, transfusion errors, surgical site infections, drug administration errors, pressure wounds due to falls and immobility, pulmonary embolism, problems arising from medical devices, injuries, ventilator-associated pneumonia, and deep vein thrombosis. No studies evaluating the relationship between operating room nurses and malpractice were found in the literature. Further studies are needed to develop strategies to reduce/prevent malpractice rates, which have important consequences for patients and health professionals and are important markers of health-care quality, and to determine the attitudes and tendencies of health professionals toward malpractice.