Annals of Medicine

Clinical Risk Management in Surgery

Surgery is facing increasing challenges from minimally invasive, technologically advanced techniques and the growing expertise required in high-risk patients. The modern socio-cultural landscape places significant value on patient expectations, along with integrated, continuous, and multi-professional care, even in home settings. At the same time, there is rising demand for more reliable and accountable healthcare services that deliver higher-quality outcomes that address informational, social, and familial concerns. Together, these factors contribute to systemic complexity, susceptible to errors, adverse events, communication deficit which lead to complaints and litigations for negligence. The international literature highlights the high frequency of negative and undesired events in the surgical settings. Clinical risk management in surgery involves identifying, analysing, and minimizing risks to improve patient safety and surgical outcomes.

A thorough risk assessment and management approach, along with an understanding of healthcare personnel's risk perceptions, are then crucial to addressing these challenges. Moreover, it’s important to strengthen best practice and standardisation, engage personnel in risk preventive strategies, collaboration and proper communication, emphasize the role of facilitators.

Area of interest include but are not limited to:

• preoperative risk assessment and its management, scoring systems and relevance,
• indication to surgery and its evaluation in frail patients,
• clinical, process and organizational outcomes,
• assessment of costs of adverse events/complications/litigations in surgery,
• healthcare acquired infection prevention and policies,
• hub-and-spokes and pathology networking for better quality and safety in surgery,
• communication, reporting and analysis of adverse events, morbidity and mortality auditing,
• patient information and methods of active involvement in the pre and post operative period,
• surveys on clinical risk management perception by practitioners and patients,
• assessment of patients’ expectations in surgery,
• adverse events prevention in surgery,
• good management of blood in the operating room and cell saver technology,
• application of technology, ICT, telemedicine and AI in surgery and follow-ups monitoring,
• technology and digitization-driven advancement for efficacy and effectiveness assessment
• analysis of litigations and/or forensic reports in traditional and minimally invasive surgery

All manuscripts submitted to this Article Collection will undergo a full peer-review; the Guest Advisors for this Collection will not be handling the manuscripts (unless they are an Editorial Board member). All Guest Advisors declare they have no Conflict of Interests.

Please review the journal scope and author submission instructions prior to submitting a manuscript.

The deadline for submitting manuscripts is 30 June 2026.

For questions or more information about APC discounts, please contact Commissioning Editor Francis Straw at [email protected].

Please be sure to select the appropriate Article Collection from the drop-down menu in the submission system. Please select the Surgery section from the list of available sections during submission. Failure to select the appropriate Article Collection or Section name can result in delays.