Extension of patient safety initiatives to perioperative care

Patient safety has significantly improved during the intraoperative period thanks to the anesthesiologists, surgeons, and nurses. Nowadays, it is within the perioperative period where most of the preventable harm happened to the surgical patient. We aim to highlight the main issues and efforts to improve perioperative patient safety focusing and the relation to intraoperative safety strategies.

There is ongoing research on perioperative safety strategies aiming to initiate multidisciplinary interventions on early stages of the perioperative period as well as an increasing focus on preventing harm from postoperative complications.

Any patient safety strategy to be implemented needs to be framed beyond the operating room and include in the intervention the whole perioperative period.