National Time Out Day _ June 11, 2025

National Time Out Day _June 11.

How It Got Started

Source: https://ortoday.com/surgical-time-out-celebrates-20th-anniversary/

William Duffy, RN, MJ, CNOR, FAAN, was the president of the Association of periOperative Registered Nurses (AORN) in the early 2000s when The Joint Commission published a list of “never events,” or events that should never occur in the operating room. Also referred to as sentinel events, these include wrong site, wrong patient and wrong procedure surgeries.

“The Joint Commission stated that these events should never occur, but they took a 10,000-foot view and didn’t say what organizations should do to prevent them from happening,” says Duffy. “I believe they thought it was up to the practicing professionals to figure it out, so initially everybody was creating their own process.”

But this didn’t solve the problem, says Duffy, because some surgeons marked the surgical site while others marked the site not to be operated on. “So, I thought, why don’t we (AORN membership) work to establish a standardized process for everyone to follow?”

Duffy took his idea to the AORN Board of Directors, which agreed with the concept. The first step was to create a taskforce that would develop a standardized process for the Surgical Time Out.

“The task force developed a Surgical Time Out toolkit that was reviewed and approved by the AORN board,” says Duffy. “The Joint Commission loved the idea of a standardized model and were early in the co-sponsoring effort, and we also got buy-in from our perioperative partner associations.”

A Surgical Time Out toolkit was mailed to every AORN member and hospital in the country. “We gave the toolkits away because we wanted everyone to adopt it,” says Duffy. “A few weeks after we mailed them out, we got requests for toolkits from hospitals in Canada, Europe and Asia.”

The final step was getting buy-in from the public.

“We knew this would be critical so we hired a PR firm and decided to create the National Time Out Day, which occurred on June 23, 2004,” says Duffy.

“We developed a ‘news report’ and rented time on a news satellite where our story could be downloaded by TV stations across the country,” Duffy adds. “Then we reached out to major media outlets. I did interviews on the CBS Early Show, Fox News, NPR, the Associated Press, USA Today and The Wall Street Journal. Our news report ended up being the top downloaded report that week.”