Shared decision making honors patient autonomy, particularly for preference-sensitive care decisions and even when patients have impaired decision-making capacity.

Whether a patient’s decisional regret constitutes a failure of shared decision making can depend on how a decision was made.

Using alternative anesthesia techniques requires collaborative decision making that expresses a patient’s best interest.

Two pediatric cases highlight risks of prolonging anesthetic exposure for training purposes and prompt questions about influences of surgical training on outcomes.

Ear, nose, and throat procedures in intraoperative environments often involve surgeons’ and anesthesiologists’ use of shared and sometimes competing approaches to managing a patient’s airway.

When errors happen, too often clinicians are at odds with each other about how to respond to a patient or a patient’s loved ones after that patient suffers harm.

Surgeons and anesthesiologists each have a unique sense of duty to patients to clarify which factors might influence outcomes after intraoperative cardiac arrest.

Corporatization in health care has complicated clinicians’ and organizations’ efforts to balance interests of individual patients against an organization’s bottom line.

Some physicians who value collective bargaining remain concerned that patient services could suffer, but unionization can be driven by a focus on improving care.

IRBs must report human subject research protocol deviations and university leadership might also need to motivate compliance with federal regulations.