Outpatient Surgery Magazine, providing current information on Surgical Services, Surgical Facility Administration, Outpatient Surgery News and Trends, OR Excellence and more.
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O C T O B E R 2 0 1 5 O U T P A T I E N TS U R G E R Y. N E T 5 7 Yes, try, try again. Our first go-round with safety sharps didn't go well. After equipping more than 70 ORs across our 7 operative sites with safety scalpels, a not-so-funny thing happened. Some of the safety sheaths fell off of the blades while they were in use. Talk about your product malfunc- tions. We had no choice but to pull them and start over. The product might have failed, but our commitment to sharps safety has grown stronger. Now it's just a matter of finding the right product to trial and implement. • Ask the OR to follow the ER. Our sister departments in the ER, GI and cardiology have successfully adopted safe- ty blades and their numbers of sharps injuries have contin- ued to dwindle. The OR for some reason has lagged behind. "We can look to their success," says Wayne McFatter, MSN, RN, CNOR, RNFA, executive director of operative services for Cone Health in Greensboro, N.C. • Reach out to surgeons. We formed a Sharps Safety Task Force to educate not only our nurses about sharps safety, but our doctors as well. One of the pivotal things we did was ask our nurses to name the doctors who'd be open-minded enough to give us honest feedback on what is important to them in a safe- ty product. Once we engaged physicians at that level, they were willing to talk to their colleagues about sharps safety. • Show them the data. Surgeons respond to numbers and science, so we tracked data on who were injuring themselves and how they were injuring themselves. We then asked, "Which of these injuries could a safety scalpel have prevented?" We stressed to our docs that the literature reflects that 70% of blade injuries are preventable with safety devices, and our blade injuries mirrored those statistics. Most sharps injuries were not occurring during passing, but when reaching for unprotected blades on the Mayo stand or back table, and when removing the blade from its handle. • It's not an all-or-nothing proposition. We acknowl- edged that a safety blade might not be applicable for every application, but we strongly recommend it for skin incision. But in a tight spot, where the sheath could obstruct visuali- zation of field (spine and GYN surgery, for example), it's not safe to use a safety blade. Same goes for arthroscopic proce- dures, where you must plunge the blade into the tissue to a certain depth. • Tug on their heartstrings. We asked a staff member who suffered a needlestick and thought she'd contracted HIV (the test ended up being a false-positive) to go to all of our ORs to present and to tell her story. This really drove home the point about the impact sharps injuries can have. We've since grown from 7 to 9 operative sites, and we're looking for another product to trial and implement. It's a matter of when, not if. And when we find the right product, that will be a good day. — Jennifer L. Fencl, DNP, RN, CNS-BC, CNOR, Dr. Fencl (jennifer.fencl@conehealth.com) is a clinical nurse specialist, operative services, at Cone Health in Greensboro, N.C. z CULTURE OF SAFETY Jennifer L. Fencl, DNP, RN, CNS-BC, CNOR, clinical nurse specialist, operative services, Cone Health, samples a safety scalpel. UNDETERRED If at First You Don't Succeed …