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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 | D E C E M B E R 2 0 1 5
An Infection Risk at the Head of the Table?
There might be if your anesthetists practice poor hand hygiene.
Y
es, we anes-
thesia
providers
routinely do things
that the folks on the
surgery side of the
table would consid-
er abominable. For
example, not disin-
fecting our hands
after airway manip-
ulation, not putting gloves on to start an IV and not cleaning the
anesthesia workstation between cases.
Not that we're bad people, or less skilled, or less intelligent. The
problem is that there's a cultural divide that's been perpetuated for
many decades. The demarcation is the surgical drape between anes-
thesia and surgery, and the different standards are on display every
day.
One reason is that it's nearly impossible to maintain aseptic tech-
nique when you're required to use both hands and then quickly
move them to something else. While intubating, for example, you
may have to quickly reach over and touch the reservoir bag to ven-
tilate the patient. Or you may have to adjust the ventilator circuit,
or inject drugs into stopcocks.
Hands in motion
Anesthesia providers are involved in a continuous stream of activity.
And a lot of tasks involving the patient, the equipment and drugs have
A N E S T H E S I A A L E R T
Clarence J. Biddle, CRNA, PhD
z DOUBLE STANDARD Shocking breaches of aseptic technique
routinely occur on the anesthesia side of the surgical drape.
