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Game Changers in Surgery - June 2018 - 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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F rom stents to heart lung machines to ultrasound to ablation and so much more, medical advances have markedly improved heart surgery over the last 50 years. Unfortunately, one of the most serious cardiac surgery complications still persists. Pressure injuries occur in as many as 29% of all cardiac cases 1 . But now technology has finally caught up with pressure injuries in the form of the Pink Heart Pad from Xodus Medical. We all know cardiac surgery patients almost always have circulatory problems, due to age, obesity, inactivity, poor nutrition and diabetes. They must be supine for more than four hours, during which time, we periodically halt or slow circulation. But in our cardiac unit, the Pink Heart Pad has neutralized these problems. It has drastically reduced the incidence of this painful, dangerous, expensive complication, and it does it economically and efficiently. If you already use Xodus's Pink Pad for urology and GYN, then you know how amazingly breathable the Pink Pad's proprietary open-cell material is. It prevents shear and wicks away liquids like bodily fluids, irrigatants and prep solutions, preserving the skin's pH and preventing irritation and breakdown. The Pink Heart Pad performs just as well in the cardiac room. So much so that we now use it for every single case, from cardiac ablations to valve repair/replacements to CABG. Pressure injury prevention is the most important reason, but there are many others: • The kit comes with DermaProx-lined arm protectors. These help you position the arms perfectly, protect from crush injuries and lift IV lines away, while still allowing free access. • Energy passes through the Pink Pad without resistance, so you can place your MegaSoft® grounding pad* and your warming system underneath. • If you're using the frog-leg position, you can fold the end of the Pink Heart Pad up so that it gently holds the patient's feet in place, securing it with the enclosed strap. Frog leg positioning pads are available as an accessory item for the kits. The Pink Heart Pad is much easier to set up than our old system. It saves us 20 minutes of OR time. No more making shoulder rolls out of sheets, cleaning and inspecting gel pads, or hunting for foam positioning donuts. Everything we need is in the single-use kit. OR assistants simply clean the table and put this right on. We also no longer fret about HAIs from reusable positioning devices. Everyone worries about economics, and here the Pink Heart Pad shines. In our facility, the price of the Pink Heart Pad is similar to the price of the devices we were using previously. Meanwhile, every pressure injury it prevents saves us $43,180, 2 and each minute we save in the OR saves us $100. 3 A product that markedly improves patient safety and reduces the cost of health care? Yes please. And thank you Xodus Medical. Ms. Hammant is the CVT Charge Nurse at East Jefferson Hospital. 1. Ballesteros, C: Teamwork for prevention: Reducing HAPUs in cardiac surgery patients. Nursing Management: July 2017 - Volume 48 - Issue 7 - p 17–20 2. Girotto JA, Koltz PF, Drugas G: Optimizing your operating room. Intl. J. Surg., Volume 8, Issue 5, 2010, pp 359-367. 3. Agency for Healthcare Quality and Research MegaSoft is a registered trademark of Ethicon Endo-Surgery This Product Really Prevents Pressure Injuries The Pink Heart Pad is extremely effective, efficient and economical. Susie Hammant, RN, CNOR,Metairie, La. Sponsored by SPECIAL ADVERTISING SUPPLEMENT Thinking pink: The author with her favorite pressure injury-fighting device.

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