Someone sent the National Enquirer a Polaroid of the burn victim.
"Woman Burned in OR" screamed the front page.
• • •
On the banishment of the surgeon's cap. Lauren Kosinski, MD, a
colorectal surgeon in Chestertown, Md., sums up the debate over surgi-
cal attire perfectly in her piece in General Surgery News. "What is at the
source of the potency of feeling and argument about what we wear?
Behind the rhetoric about patient safety and infection control is a power
struggle between doctors and nurses, which is still fundamentally a
struggle between men and women, and resentment of the asymmetry of
authority, respect and value. Cloaking the issue of appropriate attire in
the untouchable topic of patient safety is a Trojan horse for penetrating
the fortress of physician authority and dominance, of getting inside the
walls and exercising control over the most personal physical space:
what we put on our bodies and how we present ourselves and visually
manifest our identity. It is about how we distinguish ourselves."
• • •
Giant insurer buys giant surgical center chain. Did you see
where UnitedHealth, the nation's largest insurer, is spending $2.3 billion
on Surgical Care Affiliates' national network of more than 200 ambula-
tory surgery centers? Analysts are applauding the acquisition for its
shrewdness. UnitedHealth would obviously prefer to pay for surgeries
at its own lower-cost centers. Now it can encourage its enrollees to con-
sider a surgical center for a procedure before a higher-priced hospital.
"UnitedHealth is attacking surgeries, which are a very large portion of
the healthcare spend," one analyst wrote. Another said, "We view sur-
gery centers as high-value providers, defined as facilities that provide
high-quality care at a price that is lower than the rate that hospitals
receive for comparable services."
OSM
F E B R U A R Y 2 0 1 7 • O U T PA T I E N TS U R G E R Y. N E T • 9
