The Surgical Care Improvement Project’s (SCIP) goal is to save lives by reducing the incidence of surgical complications by 25 percent by the year 2010. The Surgical Care Improvement Project (SCIP) targets areas where the incidence and cost of surgical complications are high. These areas are: Surgical Site Infections (SSI), Cardiovascular complications (CV), Venous Thromboembolism (VTE) complications, Ventilator associated pneumonia . The SCIP project focuses on these four components and lists preventive measures that the team can take to reduce surgical patient morbidity and mortality. Although some surgical complications are unavoidable, surgical care can be improved through better adherence to evidence-based practice recommendations.