Outpatient Surgery Magazine

Give Your Patients the VIP Treatment - Subscribe to Outpatient Surgery Magazine - May 2018

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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use. I used to have our pharmacy director look in our trash cans to see what drugs we were throwing out. That's a good place to start to identify drugs that may be better off purchased in prefilled syringes. • Time. How much time do your nurses spend finding the vial of medication, grabbing the proper needle, drawing it up, labeling it and administering it to the patient? With a prefilled syringe, you just grab the syringe and administer the medication. This could be a huge time-saver, so you need to determine how much your staff's time is worth and include that in your calculation. • Waste. All vials accessed in the OR are single-use and many cen- ters have adopted a policy to treat all of their vials, even multi-dose, as single-use. So you're always throwing away some medication that didn't make it into the syringe you just drew up. You spent $1 on that 10 mL vial of neostigmine, but you threw out 6 mL of it just now. How much did you waste? You paid for the whole vial and used less than half of it. You then have to factor in the costs of properly dispos- ing of the unused medication. Do you buy disposable containers with chemicals that render the medication unusable or do you buy car- tridges for a wall-mounted disposal system? Switching to prefilled syringes could reduce the number of containers or cartridges you need to purchase. • Materials. There's always the cost of syringes and needles to think about, but if you're drawing up medications from ampules you need to have a filtered needle. These extra materials need to make it into your cost considerations. You also need a dedicated space, away from patient care areas, to draw up the medications. Finding or creating that space takes resources and time that you need to consider. • Errors. Prefilled syringes can reduce the chance that a medication is drawn up incorrectly or not labeled properly and given to the wrong patient. There are many articles and statistics on medication 5 2 • O U T PA T I E N T S U R G E R Y M A G A Z I N E • M A Y 2 0 1 8

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