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Jun 12, 2025
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Creating a Culture of Safety in the Operating Room

Speaker

David L Feldman, MD, MBA, CPE, FAAPL, FACS

is a physician leader in patient safety, risk management, and culture change. He is a faculty member, advisor, and mentor as part of the Clinical Quality Fellowship Program (CQFP), sponsored by the Greater New York Hospital Association (GNYHA) and the United Hospital Fund (UHF). The CQFP is designed to develop and nurture the next generation of clinical quality leaders in the New York metropolitan region. Dr. Feldman is a member of the American Hospital Association (AHA) Team Training Advisory Panel and serves as a mentor in the AHA Next Generation Leaders Fellowship program. As a Clinical Assistant Professor in the Department of Medicine (Education) at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine, he is an instructor in the Financial Literacy for Medical Students course.

Dr. Feldman is the former Chief Medical Officer of The Doctors Company Group (TDCG). Dr. Feldman led the group's education efforts and was the primary spokesperson for trends and issues on patient safety and risk management. He was also senior vice president and chief medical officer at Healthcare Risk Advisors (HRA), a subsidiary of TDCG. Under his leadership, HRA provided resources, and a collaborative environment designed to minimize claims and lower premiums for HRA clients by preventing patient harm, enhancing teamwork and communication, and improving documentation.

Before his position at HRA, Dr. Feldman was vice president for patient safety, vice-president of perioperative services, and vice chairman of the department of surgery at Maimonides Medical Center in Brooklyn, NY. There he implemented numerous patient safety initiatives including the use of the WHO surgical checklist. As past president of the Maimonides medical staff, Dr. Feldman was instrumental in the creation and implementation of a hospital-wide Code of Mutual Respect, and physician peer review committee.

Dr. Feldman served on the American College of Surgeon’s (ACS) Simulation-Based Surgical Education Patient Safety Organization Steering Committee. He has also served on the ACS committee on perioperative care and as vice chairman of the ACS collaborative task force for the development of high-performance teams in surgery. He also served as the ACS liaison to the AORN recommended practices committee.

Dr. Feldman is a master TeamSTEPPSTM trainer and a certified trainer in Crucial Conversations® and Crucial Confrontations®. Dr. Feldman received a BA and MD from Duke University, completed training in general surgery at The Roosevelt Hospital (now Mount Sinai West), and plastic surgery at Duke University Medical Center. He earned an MBA from New York University.

Description

Operating Room managers, patient safety leaders, and clinical department heads struggle to move toward a culture of safety. This session will describe the four key ingredients needed to reach this goal: mutual respect, teamwork, human factors engineering, and just culture.

The session will begin with discussing the importance of mutual respect as this is a particularly difficult challenge when recognizing healthcare’s hierarchical nature and its impact on staff members’ ability to speak up.

Ensuring that staff can communicate optimally, support each other, and have situational awareness and appropriate leadership skills are critical to achieve excellence in surgical outcomes. This portion of the session will focus on TeamSTEPPs principles, including data to show outcomes and more advanced tools for those institutions that have trained staff but need next steps.

Human factors engineering is an often neglected aspect of safety culture and yet healthcare leaders understand that even with optimal training humans will make mistakes. This section will explore how OR leaders can incorporate human factors engineering principles including simple strategies like supply labeling as well as more advanced tools such as radio frequency labeled OR sponges.

The final ingredient of a safety culture discussed will be the implementation of Just Culture principles. The presenter will review the important elements of the Just Culture structure including how to assess the decisions our colleagues make in the delivery of care. Remedies to hold healthcare providers accountable for these decisions will be reviewed.

Webinar Outline: Creating a Culture of Safety in the Operating Room

Learning Objectives

At the end of the webinar, the participant should be able to:

1. Understand the elements necessary to develop a patient safety culture in the OR.

2. Understand how healthcare institutions can practically improve teamwork and human factors design in the OR.

3. Evaluate areas where implicit bias can influence safety in the OR.

Provider approved by the California Board of Registered Nursing, Provider number 12205 for 1 contact hours.

This meeting has been submitted for approval for 1 contact hour of Continuing Education Credit toward fulfillment of the requirements of ASHRM designations of FASHRM (Fellow) and DFASHRM (Distinguished Fellow) and towards CPHRM renewal.

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