Do you have a strong preventative maintenance and repair
program in place for your surgical instruments?
Most patients never consider that the scissors, clamps and retractors
being used on them have been used on other people many times
before. So it's your team's job to make sure that equipment is as safe as
possible. Reusable surgical instruments have a limited lifespan and
must be maintained, repaired and removed in accordance with strict
manufacturer specifications to ensure that no subpar instrumentation
reaches your patients. If you don't, any number of intraoperative
instrument failures can occur, which can cause cross-contamination,
surgical burns, retained foreign bodies or dangerous delays.
Does your facility have the proper tools and instrument mod-
els to allow for adequate inspection during reprocessing?
With the growing complexity of surgical instrumentation comes the
need for critical inspection tools, such as flexible inspection scopes
for orthopedic shavers, desktop magnification for micro-eye instru-
mentation and protein detection systems to pinpoint residual biobur-
den before sterilization. If you're still using the first generation of
instruments known as laparoscopic graspers and Kerrison rongeurs,
it's time to replace them. Unlike today's newer models, those older
instruments can't be taken apart or flushed properly during the decon-
tamination phase.
Is there sufficient instrument inventory
to support your facility's surgical volume?
Due to the competitive financial realities of American healthcare,
many facilities seek to manage their operating room schedules at an
ever-growing capacity, but they're sometimes not proactive in invest-
ing in the capital funds necessary to purchase sufficient levels of
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