OR Manager; Vol. 27 No. 9; September 2011 Have you faced any of these situations? You receive loaner instruments for a case the same morning the case is scheduled. You receive loaner instruments without cleaning/sterilization instructions for use (IFU). You receive loaner sets you have never seen before. Neither the…

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OR Manager; Vol. 27 No. 9; September 2011 The Food and Drug Administration should replace its 35-year-old 510(k) process for medical devices, the Institute of Medicine (IOM) urges in a new report. The IOM finds the process is flawed as a means to screen devices for safety and efficacy before…

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OR Manager; Vol. 27 No. 9; September 2011 A circulating nurse reports she called 3 times, asking a technical support assistant to bring a piece of equipment to the OR, but the equipment never arrived. Later, it’s learned the assistant didn’t know what the equipment was and was afraid to…

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OR Manager; Vol. 27 No. 9; September 2011 The government’s long-awaited plan for quality reporting by ambulatory surgery centers (ASCs) was issued July 1, 2011. If the proposal is finalized later this fall, the time-line could be short. ASCs might need to have quality-reporting systems in place as early as…

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"When was the last time you relived a favorite bedtime routine from your past? Do you remember the special feeling and aroma of a warm bath, clean pajamas, and freshly laundered sheets with a relaxing bedtime story and a cup of warm milk or bedtime tea?" This is one tip…

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Sometimes it's all in a word. Struggling for compliance with the pause before surgery, a Michigan hospital tried changing the terminology, and that has made all the difference. Instead of "time-out," the new term is "patient safety briefing." Once the change was made, "we saw immediately that the focus changed,"…

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Laptops are stolen from a physician's office in a break-in, compromising data for hundreds of patients. An employee loses a personal hard drive that contains patient data. A radiologist joins a new outpatient facility and contacts patients from his previous employer, using information he downloaded before he left. Is your…

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Flexible endoscope reprocessing continues to be a major focus in infection prevention. All of the known cases of pathogen transmission during GI endoscopy have been traced to breaches in accepted cleaning and disinfection guidelines or other infection prevention practices. A revised Multisociety Guideline on Reprocessing Flexible GI Endoscopes, released in…

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