Page 30
T A B L E S
BEACH CHAIR Is it dangerous to perform shoulder arthroscopy in the beach-chair position?
TABLE SAFETY
Beach Chair or Lateral
Position for Shoulders?
How do you position your shoulder arthroscopy patients? A couple of our doctors prefer the lateral position, but most use a beach-chair attachment on our standard OR table for their shoulder cases.
It's been reported that beach-chair patients can become hypoxic being in the upright position, but you can maintain cerebral blood flow by carefully monitoring the patient. Most surgeons like the access and the comfort the beach chair affords them. It's a little harder to manipulate the shoulder and pressure points when patients are in the lateral position, so the beach chair is a preferred choice at our facility. The advantages of the lateral position are decreasing the patient's risk for adverse neurologic events due to cerebral ischemia and not having to secure a big attachment to the bed.
As a safety precaution, we'll secure a beach-chair attachment the night before so it's ready to go first thing in the morning. And as a policy, we have 2 staff members check that the attachment is secure before we position a patient on it.
— Harriet H. Willoughby, BSN Ms. Willoughby (harriet.willoughby@scasurgery.com) is the administrator of the Gadsden (Ala.) Surgery Center.
--------------------
• Do your homework. Find out which features matter most to your OR team. The only way to do this is to sit down with those who'll be working around the table and ask, "What do you like? What are your requirements? What do you need in a table?" As Mark Twain said, supposing is good, but finding out is better. Your job is to collect facts and to understand the features that matter to your customers (yes, your surgeons are your customers and your staff are your associates), and then find the tables that best match up.
