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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surgical instruments until they can get cleaned," says Mark Voigt, director of sterile processing at CentraCare Health in St. Cloud, Minn. "If blood is allowed to dry, it can cause that pitting and rusting. It could be so bad that you have to replace the instruments, and that's costly." 2. Preventive maintenance program. Make sure you're on a good preventive maintenance program. There are a lot of repair com- panies out there that will come to your facility and set up a program to have routine checks — for example, sharpening blades and making sure clamps are lined up properly — that will help instruments from becoming damaged beyond repair. Think about your car. If you're good to it, it'll be good to you. If you change the oil every 3,000 miles, you could get more than 100,000 miles from the car. But it you abuse your car, you're likely to have problems. It's the same with your instruments. Modern-day surgical instrumentation is becoming even more complicated, especially in robotics. And it's way more expensive to fix than it used to be. "That's why it's imperative to make sure your equipment is working appropriately," says Mr. Voigt. 3. Transport with care. You can damage instruments while transporting them. Make sure that your sterile processing department is packaging your instruments in a way that follows the manufactur- er's IFU. But that's not all. Make sure that instruments aren't being jos- tled during handling, particularly in the transport cannister. "We see even more damage to instruments from the OR on the way to our decontamination area," says Mr. Voigt. "I don't think anybody is trying to intentionally damage instruments, but they're being pushed to go faster and faster to turn the room over. Sometimes it's just kicking the 9 2 • 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 9

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