About Patient Safety in Surgery

What is Patient Safety in Surgery?

Patient Safety in Surgery is an open access, online journal that publishes papers on all issues related to safety and quality of patient care in surgery and surgical subspecialties.

Morbidity and mortality in patients undergoing surgical procedures may, in large part, be preventable. The key to improving the management of adverse events in surgery is understanding their causes. These range from “simple” individual errors in surgical technique and perioperative decision making to system errors in hospitals, and extend as far as to general healthcare issues in politics.

An evidence-based approach to quality improvement in surgical care must include the analysis of incidence and pattern of adverse events. This is particularly true for the analysis of procedures that did not result in an adverse event but had strong potential to, thus bearing the risk of these cases being neglected or trivialized, instead of being reported and reviewed as a “true” complication.

The journal provides a scientific platform for specialists from all surgical fields and for other healthcare professionals to report, discuss, debate, and critically review all aspects related to errors, complications, and other safety issues in the management of patients undergoing surgical procedures.

Content overview

Patient Safety in Surgery considers the following types of articles:

• Research: reports of data from original research.
• Case report: reports of clinical cases that can be educational, describe a diagnostic or therapeutic dilemma, suggest an association, or present an important adverse reaction. All case report articles should be accompanied by written and signed consent to publish the information from the patients or their guardians.
• Debate: present an argument that is not essentially based on practical research. Debate articles can report on all aspects of the subject including sociological and ethical aspects.
• Hypothesis: short articles presenting an untested original hypothesis backed solely by previously published results rather than any new evidence. They should outline significant progress in thinking that would also be testable, and be about 1500 words.
• Letter to the Editor: they can take three forms: a substantial re-analysis of a previously published article, or a substantial response to such a re-analysis from the authors of the original publication, or an article that may not cover 'standard research' but that may be relevant to readers.
• Review: comprehensive, authoritative, descriptions of any subject within the journal's scope. Reviews can cover any topical themes such as basic science and clinical reviews, ethics, pro/con debates, equipment reviews and thematic series to highlight specific topics in the field.
• Short report: brief reports of data from original research, usually about 1500 words.

Peer-review policy

• All peer review for Patient Safety in Surgery is closed, meaning that referees' confidentiality is maintained and referees reports are not made publicly available.
• Each submitted article will first be screened by the Editors-in-Chief for suitability for peer review.
• All manuscripts that are deemed suitable for peer review will be assigned to at least two expert reviewers. Authors will be requested to answer all reviewers’ comments on a point-by-point analysis. The Editors-in-Chief will decide on whether to accept or reject a manuscript based on reviewer recommendations.
• If required, manuscripts will be sent to a statistician.
• Where reviewer’s comments are conflicting, the Editorial Board or an additional independent reviewer will be consulted to help reach an editorial decision.
• Should an author be unsatisfied with the editorial decision, members of the Editorial Board will analyze the authors’ justification and additional reviewers may be sought, if appropriate.

Edited by Philip F. Stahel and Pierre-Alain Clavien, Patient Safety in Surgery is supported by an expert Editorial Board.

Publishing in Patient Safety in Surgery

All articles are listed in PubMed immediately upon acceptance (after peer review), and are covered by PubMed Central.

Articles in Patient Safety in Surgery should be cited in the same way as articles in a traditional journal. However, because articles in this journal are not printed, they do not have page numbers. Instead, they have a unique article number.

The following citation:

Patient Saf Surg 2004, 2:1

refers to article 1 from volume 2 of the journal.

As an online journal, Patient Safety in Surgery does not have issue numbers. Each volume corresponds to a calendar year.

To keep up to date with the latest articles from Patient Safety in Surgery, why not register to receive alerts? Registration also enables you to customise your subject areas of interest, store your searches, and submit your manuscripts.

Submission of manuscripts

Manuscripts should be submitted electronically to Patient Safety in Surgery using the online submission system. Full details of how to submit a manuscript are given in the instructions for authors.

General journal policies

Patient Safety in Surgery is published by BioMed Central, part of Springer Science+Business Media. BioMed Central is committed to ensuring peer-reviewed biomedical research is open access. That means it is freely and universally accessible online, it is archived in at least one internationally recognised free access repository, and its authors retain copyright, allowing anyone to reproduce or disseminate articles, according to the BioMed Central copyright and licence agreement. Patient Safety in Surgery however, has taken this further by making all its content open access.

Patient Safety in Surgery's articles are archived in PubMed Central, the US National Library of Medicine's full-text repository of life science literature, and also at INIST in France and in e-Depot, the National Library of the Netherlands' digital archive of all electronic publications. The journal is also participating in the British Library's e-journals pilot project, and plans to deposit copies of all articles with the British Library.

Patient Safety in Surgery is able to deliver summaries of frequently updated content via Really Simple Syndication (RSS) feeds. These are accessible via the orange "XML" button at the top of the list of recent articles or the list of most accessed articles. For more information about RSS feeds see our publisher's website.

For further information about general policies please see the instructions for authors.