Outpatient Surgery Magazine - Subscribers

Best Buys - July 2013 - 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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Page 94 THINKING OF BUYING ... Ophthalmic Safety Blades Make shielded sharps work for you. Jackie Dayton, RN We weren't using safety blades for our cataract surgeries a year ago. But we're using them now, along with safety-engineered suture needles, IV starts, everything. Here are some of the factors that went into our purchasing decision. 1 Concern over compliance Our OR staff hadn't seen much in the way of sharps injury incidents, and our surgeons, like most surgeons, were of the opinion that something that's working well doesn't need to be changed. But managers have been seeing an increased push for safety sharps, from federal and state regulators, from accreditation agencies and from healthcare industry organizations, each of which has been demanding ongoing quality improvement and monitoring to ensure the protection of employees in the surgical workplace. So finding an ophthalmic blade that delivered safe use without compromising on functionality made itself a high-priority item on our to-do list. 2 Hands-on agreement You won't be able to adopt safety blades, or even run a trial on them, without first selecting your potential options and literally putting them into your surgeons' hands. Even after a vendor's representative dropped by with a convincing argument and the offer of a 6-week trial, it was a little bit of a struggle to get our 3 surgeons on board. We told them about the looming requirements from OSHA, the state of Indiana and our accreditor, and also drew a reassuring line: All 3 docs had to agree to adopt a particular type of safety knife, or we wouldn't switch to that product. We weren't going to buy separate products for each one of them.

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