4 2 S U P P L E M E N T T O O U T P A T I E N T S U R G E R Y M A G A Z I N E A U G U S T 2 0 1 7
serious injury or a workers' compen-
sation claim.
Direct collection
"What goes in must come out," is
how Matt Cooper, BSN, RN, CNOR,
RNFA, director of surgical services
at the Spencer (Iowa) Hospital,
sums up the challenge. "So the ques-
tion becomes, as it comes out, how
do we deal with it?"
Mr. Cooper has been around long
enough to remember what it was like
dealing with arthroscopic fluid waste
before today's high-tech options were
available. "We used to capture it in
suction buckets and then empty the
fluid into another pail," he says. "At
the end of the case, we'd be carrying
out a couple of buckets of fluid, put-
ting ourselves at risk of exposure
after exposure after exposure."
Not exactly the good old days.
Mr. Cooper decided he needed to protect himself and his staff from the biohaz-
ardous waste that pours off patients' joints. The advent of floor suction devices
helped, and still does, "but inevitably we would also end up throwing blankets on
the floor," he recalls. "And we'd end up with tons of saturated blankets. You can
imagine the expense of dealing with that. We were charged by the pound to get
them cleaned, so we weren't just paying for the linens, we were also paying for
pounds and pounds of water in the linens."
• DRAINING CHORE There's a busy caseload of arthroscopic proce-
dures at the Outpatient Center of Jonesboro (Ark.), where the docking
station can handle 4 portable large-capacity units.
Jimmy
Henderson
