The day of surgery
Stay sober regulations
On the day of surgery you should:
- Follow the soberness rule
- Don't smoke
- Don't use nail polish or make-up
- Remove jewelry and piercings
- Stop or use your medication as has been discussed with your anesthesiologist
- Take a relaxing medication on hour before surgery when this has been discussed with your anesthesiologist during the preoperative screening visit. This medication should be administered using some water. The medication will reduce your fear for surgery and will give you a relaxed feeling.
For the safety of patients and due to hygienic regulations, you will receive a urine catheter under anesthesia in case of planned surgical procedure of more than 2.5 hours. Did you recently receive a vaccination? There should be two days in between the vaccination date and surgical date in adult surgical patients.
Sober regulations for adults and children > 5 kg
- 6 hours before surgery you are prohibited to eat
- Until 2 hours before surgery you may drink water, apple juice, thee with sugar or Roosvicee®
Sober regulations for children < 5 kg:
- Stop bottle feeding 6 hours before surgery
- Stop breast feeding 4 hours before surgery
- Until 2 hours before surgery you may give your child apple juice or Roosvicee®
PASSPORT
What is PASSPORT?
PASSPORT is the abbreviation of PAtient Safety System in the Peri-Operative and Risk management Track. Passport is a derivative of SURPASS, a collection of checklists for the total of aspects in the surgical track, which has been developed and validated by the Academic Medical Center. PASSPORT is currently used in paper form, but we aim to digitalize this procedure in the near future.
PASSPORT is based on common causes for medical incidents and consists of a compilation of 10 different checklists. The following multidisciplinary checks are executed in the operating theater: the time-out procedure and the debriefing procedure. Additionally, there is a logistic checklist available that includes all transfer moments in the surgical track. Important items even require a double-check, which leads to the avoidance of errors and results in full information of the involved nurses and clinicians. It is of great importance that all employes fully agree about the checklist.
Stop rule:
In case of an incomplete checklist or the absence of the required signatures, a patient is not transferred to the subsequent step in the surgical procedure. This means that the surgical track is temporarily stopped and may be postponed. We aim to avoid this situation in all cases.
Is PASSPORT used for your surgical procedure?
All patients undergoing elective surgery in the VU University Medical Center are subjected to the PASSPORT checks. In case of life-threatening circumstances, PASSPORT will be started in case of stable clinical situation, and will be followed by debriefing.
The checklist items will be controlled and checked by several colleagues involved in the surgical procedure, including surgeons, anesthesiologists, residents, surgery assistants and anesthesia nurses. All involved personnel in the PASSPORT procedure rely on the answers given by their colleagues and will act conform the provided information.