Outpatient Surgery Magazine

No Guarantees - March 2017 - Subscribe to Outpatient Surgery Magazine

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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Every scope has a different IFU, she adds. "If you know how to clean a cysto- scope, it's a totally dif- ferent process to do the colonoscopes — longer channels, dif- ferent leak tester. All of the rules change with every single scope. I'm sure the people who do it all day, every day are better at it than me, but what about when they're pressured to go faster or inter- rupted?" It's dangerously tempting for techs to think it's okay to cut the 5-minute flush-and-brush down to 3 minutes because the AER will clean what they miss, says Mr. Lavanchy. "The scope must be cleaned before you put it in the machine," he stresses. "Don't count on the AER to take care of cleaning. It's not intended to do that. Some mod- els have cleaning stages in them, but you need to put a manually cleaned scope into the machine to ensure you get a good result. Shortcutting the process can potentially risk infections down the line." Time to sterilize? The patient was nervous about his upcoming colonoscopy, not about the prep or the propofol or the procedure, but about the risk of infec- tion from the scope. "Don't worry. All of our scopes are sterile," you assure him. "Sterile?" he asks. M A R C H 2 0 1 7 • O U T PA T I E N TS U R G E R Y. N E T • 3 9 • CLEANING VERIFICATION A tech collects samples from a sterilized ureteroscope to test for the presence of protein, hemoglobin, ATP and microbes. Ofstead & Associates

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