throats and lungs, and can also impact our patients' outcomes when
they absorb laparoscopic plume.
Surgical smoke is clearly a critical workplace safety issue.
Protecting your employees and your patients from its risks depends
on your facility's ability to correct the misunderstandings and over-
come the barriers standing between hazardous clinical practices and
better occupational health.
Clearing the air
First and foremost, it is utterly essential to equip every OR in which
surgical energies are used and plume is generated with smoke evacua-
tion technology. That's not all. You also have to make sure that your
physicians and staff actually operate the devices in every case in
which surgical energies are used and plume is generated, and do so
correctly.
Surgical smoke evacuation technology is your first line of defense
and, to a large extent, your only option for capturing and filtering the
contaminants in plume. Standard-issue surgical masks, which are able
to filter particles as small as 5 microns, won't stop the 77% of smoke
that's less than 1.1 microns in size from reaching your alveoli. While
N95 respirators and other high-filtration masks have been proven
more effective, these more expensive, individually fit-tested barriers
don't block all of smoke's hazardous matter, and won't protect the
patient the way that evacuation and filtration does.
Don't make the mistake of thinking that regular room suction will
evacuate surgical smoke. Without a high-powered filter, it's just mov-
ing it around and re-releasing it into the air. Keep in mind that if you
can smell the smoke — even outside of the OR — you're getting the
bad effects of it. All smoke evacuators are fitted with ultra-low pene-
tration air (ULPA) filters, which capture 99.999% of airborne particles,
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