1. Check the current inventory
You need to know what's already in your carts, so make an itemized
list of what you find in each drawer. During our first team meeting, we
looked at the lists to see what the differences were among the con-
tents of the carts. While referring to the MHAUS guidelines, we
assessed the necessity of every item we stocked belonging there.
2. Eliminate repeated items
Your anesthesia cart is stocked with many of the supplies recom-
mended on the MHAUS list. You can eliminate clutter in the MH cart
and save time and confusion during an emergency response if staff
members know some of the needed supplies are in the anesthesia
cart. For example, we keep esophageal probes, rectal temperature
probes and forehead temperature indicator strips on our anesthesia
carts, so we eliminated them from the MH carts with the assumption
that if an emergency were to occur, our staff would likely go to the
more familiar cart for a temperature-measuring device. We repeated
this process with medications as well as equipment. In the end, all
carts were the same with one exception: We added arterial lines to the
off-site surgery center cart because we don't stock them on our anes-
thesia carts in that location.
3. Identify the contents
Label all drawers, clearly indicating what's inside. Here's how we
organized our carts, based on MHAUS's list of needed supplies.
4. Highlight the dantrolene
As we discussed and reviewed our carts, we found that a nurse would
have to open 3 separate drawers in order to reconstitute the lifesaving
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