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O U T P A T I E N T S U R G E R Y M A G A Z I N E O N L I N E | O C T O B E R 2 0 1 5
Does Forced-Air Warming Increase SSI Risk?
The inventor of the Bair Hugger now claims it's dangerous.
I
f we are to believe the allegations in the recent
spate of Bair Hugger lawsuits that forced-air warm-
ers can cause deep joint infections in orthopedic
implant surgery patients by stirring up "contaminated
waste heat" from the OR floor and then lifting the air-
borne germs alongside the OR table and depositing
them into the sterile surgical field, then you should wheel your Bair
Huggers into the storage closet and use them as lead apron hangers.
But if these lawsuits — more than 20 have been filed at last count
in what appears to be a well-organized mass tort litigation — turn out
to be a bunch of hot air, then by all means keep doing what you've
been doing: warming patients before, during and after surgery to pro-
vide comfort and to stave off infection.
An odd set of circumstances surrounds the lawsuits. 3M's Bair
Hugger has been around since 1987, and has been used to warm more
than 200 million patients in surgery centers and hospitals around the
world. The world's most popular patient warming device is under
attack by none other than Scott D. Augustine, MD, the anesthesiologist
who invented it.
"We didn't recognize the problem when I
was running the company and remarkably
over 20 years no one else did either. About
6 years after I left the company, we acciden-
tally discovered the unintended conse-
quence of forced-air warming," says Dr.
Augustine.
Today, Dr. Augustine is CEO of Augustine
Temperature Management, maker of the air-
E D I T O R ' S P A G E
Dan O'Connor
InstaPoll
Can forced-air patient warmers
cause surgical site infections?
yes 34%
no 33%
unsure 33%
SOURCE: Outpatient Surgery
Magazine InstaPoll, September
2015, n=279