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A Drug Diverter Comes Clean - Subscribe to Outpatient Surgery Magazine - December 2017

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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The bad? "We audit at least once a year," says one respondent. "This is done on a quarterly basis, or sooner if needed," says another. "We do weekly culture audits on our scopes," says a third. In other words, says Ms. Ofstead, audits and inspections aren't being done nearly often enough. Consider that protocols for sterile instru- ments call for audits to be done with every cycle, for chemical indica- tors to be put into every tray or peel pouch, or for biological indica- tors to be used every day or with every load. If audits and verification tests are done less often, can you really be sure that endoscope repro- cessing is effective? "They need to begin doing these quality checks now, and they should be done every day," says Ms. Ofstead. Moreover, if you perform thorough inspections, you should expect to occasionally see problems with scopes that require re-cleaning, repairs, and more frequent maintenance. But don't blame your repro- cessing techs, says Ms. Ofstead. After all, scopes used for messy and bloody procedures are tough to clean, and if they aren't immediately pre-cleaned in the OR, residue becomes virtually impossible to remove. Critical point A panel of stakeholders assembled this past fall by the Association for the Advancement of Medical Instrumentation (AAMI) recommended that endoscopes used for therapeutic and diagnostic purposes be reclassified as critical, not semicritical. If that happens, high-level dis- infection would no longer be considered adequate. But the group, which included Ms. Ofstead — in addition to repre- sentatives from healthcare organizations, manufacturers, testing labs, research groups, academia, and government, among others — acknowledged that such a transition would be challenging, and would 1 3 4 • O U T PA T I E N T S U R G E R Y M A G A Z I N E • D E C E M B E R 2 0 1 7

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