 One of the greatest threats to patient safety during an operation is surgical site infection, an infection in the part of the body where a surgery takes place. Healthcare professionals try their best to prevent this type of infection by scrubbing their hands and arms up to their elbows before surgery, maintaining a normal and constant temperature during surgery, and thoroughly cleaning the skin at the site of surgery. But the increasing mortality caused by surgical site infections has forced healthcare professionals to consider every possible way in which the surgical environment can be disturbed. That includes minimizing traffic into and out of the operating room. Studies show that the opening and closing of doors during surgery allow for the entry of bacteria-carrying particles, which pose the risk of infection. While a closed-door policy would be unfeasible for the dynamic environment of today's operating room, it is undoubtable that decreasing traffic into and out of the operating room during surgery would go a long way toward reducing the risk of infection. A recent study suggests that one effective way to reduce traffic during surgery is through a collaborative effort among healthcare professionals to identify the root causes of that traffic. For an orthopedic operating room in a university medical center, researchers showed that a five-step problem-solving exercise could reduce door movements by up to 78%. In this study, researchers implemented an intervention called the A3 report among a team of four healthcare professionals working in an orthopedic operating room. An orthopedic surgeon, an anesthesiologist, a surgical coordinator, and a quality coordinator. The A3 report is a problem-solving tool that originated in the field of lean manufacturing, a field concerned with maintaining customer value while minimizing work and costs. The report involves five main steps. Define the problem, specify the current situation, determine the ideal situation, analyze the gap between the two situations, and take action for improvement. By adapting this process to their operating room environment, the surgical team identified three main causes of traffic during surgery, an unclear policy among team members about entering and leaving during surgery, the lack of visibility of the operating room's telephone number, and an ambiguous sign warning against entry during surgery. After proposing and implementing improvements to eliminate these root causes, the number of door movements decreased dramatically from approximately 24 per hour to four per hour over a six-month follow-up period, a decrease of 78%. While the researchers admit that their results are specific to one operating room at one institution and make no direct link between door movements and surgical site infections, they highlight the potential of adapting lean practices such as the A3 report to improve quality of care and patient safety in a healthcare setting.