Spine20

Symposium #7

Patient Safety and Spine Care

Subject overview

The number of spine surgeries is ever increasing globally and they are associated with overall higher rates of complication due to the nature of the bony and the intimately related major neuronal and vascular structures.
These complications may happen intra-operatively or the postoperative period and literature shows that unfavourable outcome may range from 10 to 15% for simple micro-discectomies. These can however be as high as even 50% for adult spinal deformities where the surgical time is prolonged, the blood loss is high and the patient may have many co-morbidities. Being a highly sensitive domain, these complications have attracted a high incidence of medico-legal issues with huge compensations.
With this background, the need for taking necessary steps to ensure utmost safety of patients undergoing spinal surgery cannot be understated and this is the topic of discussion for symposium.

Symposium Objective

The major objective of the symposium is to highlight the impact and cost of unsafety and complications in spine surgery. Emphasis will be made on the fact that Safety involves care right from the time of diagnosis to the entire process of treatment.
The symposium is targeted to provide an overview of the various risk stratification protocols to reduce complication, other strategies and patient-specific approaches in surgical decision making which may help in enhancing the patient safety. The role of major technological advancements in spine surgery including navigation, robotics, neuromonitoring etc in reducing the complications will also be discussed.