How Can OR Teams Improve Environmental Cleaning Between Surgical Cases?

Five back-to-back cases. A full waiting room. An urgent add-on that just landed on the schedule. Every operating room (OR) team knows what turnover pressure feels like, and I’ve spent enough time studying environmental hygiene to know exactly where that pressure does its damage: in the small cleaning steps that get skipped when the next case is already waiting.

As lead author of the recent update to the Association of periOperative Registered Nurses’s (AORN’s) Guideline for Environmental Hygiene (formerly the Guideline for Environmental Cleaning), I’ve looked closely at how that pressure plays out in real turnovers, and where the process can be strengthened.