employees had to temporarily relocate so repairs could be made to
their homes. They took home a lot of blue wrap and used it to pack
their goods."
Ms. Chiasson and her staff do all they can to keep blue wrap out of
the ORs' trash cans, re-purposing smaller blue wraps as arm-board
covers and laying larger pieces under OR tables to catch prep that runs
off the patient. Blue wrap acts as a barrier during big plastics cases. It
also comes in handy when you need a place to lay specimens.
Blue wrap isn't the only OR refuse you can recycle, says Ms.
Chiasson. One of her nurses discovered that Mayo stand covers make
great trash bags. Another nurse takes home the plastic wrap and puts
it in her own recycling bin to keep it out of the ORs' trash collection.
Note: Yes, blue wrap is clean waste, but some may mistake it for red
bag waste, which of course is much more costly than regular trash. Set
up a recycling bin for blue wrap so staff don't drop it in the red bag.
Reprocessed devices
Memorial Hermann is also finding success with reprocessing single-
use devices. "Reprocessed" devices undergo a detailed, multistep
process to clean and then disinfect or sterilize them before they're
returned to the center, which pays a fraction of the cost of a new
device. Among the items the ortho-heavy ASC reprocesses are shavers
and tourniquets and SpO2 probes. Just recently, the surgery center
started to reprocess such ENT devices as insufflation devices and
turbinate shavers. Yet that decision did not come fast. First, they had
to convince the ENT surgeons, who of course wanted a new device
each time they did a procedure.
"If they found out that it wasn't new, the doctors hesitated to use it,"
says Ms. Chiasson. "They said it wouldn't work as well."
The OR team conducted a blind test. It mixed reprocessed ENT
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