Outpatient Surgery Magazine

OR Excellence 2019 Awards - September 2019 - 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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inconsistencies in the handling, transport and delivery of flexible scopes." The team delved into where in the process there could be potential breakdowns, assigning a code to each one that reflected the potential for it to result in patient harm. For example, a scope that wasn't cleaned correctly would be assigned a different weight than mistakes in documentation. Armed with that analysis, the team devised a comprehensive response plan that touched many departments, including sterile pro- cessing, clinical engineering, infection control, surgery, endoscopy, anesthesia and process improvement. Here are the key aspects of the new process. • Limited access. The first change the Baystate team implemented addressed the relatively easy access to scopes, which led to them being all over the hospital and difficult to track down. "Before, pretty much anyone could go into sterile processing and obtain a scope simply by opening the door of the cabinet, and off it went," says Ms. Betti. "If a scope was sitting on a counter in SPD, they could grab it." Now, only an SPD supervisor is permitted to access and assign out a high-level disinfected scope. "This was a big culture change," says Ms. Betti. • Consolidated reprocessing. Baystate was reprocessing scopes across 4 buildings. Now all scope reprocessing is performed in one specialized, renovated area. There was also a "purposeful" decrease in the number of staff members deemed competent in reprocessing of scopes; Ms. Betti says now 4 validated experts dubbed endoscope reprocessing technicians carry out all aspects of cleaning, testing, inspection and disinfecting of flexible scopes. "Tightening up the reprocessing to have it in one area made it easier to maintain consis- tent practice," says Ms. Betti. "We can really keep an eye on it and S E P T E M B E R 2 0 1 9 • O U T PA T I E N T S U R G E R Y. N E T • 4 5

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