In the past few years, ASA members could easily be engaged and impassioned by asking a simple question – “What do you think about surgical attire?” The 2015 “Guideline on Surgical Attire” produced by the Association of periOperative Registered Nurses (AORN) addressed the acceptability of wearing a significant number of items that constituted much of anesthesiologists’ daily wardrobe. That guideline included requirements on “scrub attire, shoes, jewelry, head coverings and masks worn in the semi-restricted and restricted areas of the perioperative practice setting,” and also extended to “personal items such as stethoscopes, backpacks, briefcases, cell phones and tablets.” The proposed changes to the guideline, released in January 2019, reflected the importance of ASA physicians actively engaging AORN to construct meaningful solutions and compromises to address the challenges placed by the original surgical attire guideline.
One of the many important roles of the ASA Committee on Surgical and Procedural Anesthesia (COSPA)...
