Outpatient Surgery Magazine

OR Excellence Awards - September 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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Kording, BSN, RN, CNOR, the perioperative educator who was moved and moti- vated by the horrid things she learned about surgical smoke from AORN's Surgical Smoke Tool Kit. For example: • Using electrosurgery on 1 gram of tissue is like inhaling the smoke from 6 cigarettes in 15 minutes. • Using the CO 2 laser on 1 gram of tissue is like inhaling smoke from 3 cigarettes in 15 minutes. Ms. Kording's concerns intensified when she thought about all of the smoke she had inhaled over the course of her 30 years as an OR nurse, and all of it the staff at Northwest inhaled, within as well as outside the OR (surgical smoke would drift down to PACU). That smoke, she learned, is filled with particulates, such as carbonized tis- sue, blood and viruses, and toxic substances such as benzene, toluene and other carcinogenics. She soon noticed her colleagues complained about coughing and respiratory problems. She didn't chalk it up to coincidence. It also was hard to escape the heavy stench of smoke and charred flesh shrouding a hospital that last year alone used electrosurgery on 5,066 patients. "The electrosurgery pencil is the workhorse of most every surgical procedure," says Ms. Kording. "When you'd walk into an OR, the smell would knock you over." It scared Ms. Kording to think of all of the surgical smoke hospitals produce nationwide because there's no federal legislation demanding 6 8 • O U T PA T I E N T S U R G E R Y M A G A Z I N E • S E P T E M B E R 2 0 1 8 • BREATHING EASIER The surgical team at Northwest Hospital in Randallstown, Md., smile wider now that the ORs are smoke-free. Northwest Hospital

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