Outpatient Surgery Magazine - Subscribers

Work-Life Balance - January 2017 - 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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can befall the latter. But in my experience — I was a surgical technician for 3 years before spending the last 6 in sterile processing — problems with sealed containers are the ones that most interrupt work flow. In the surgical trenches, I often saw containers mismatched with their inner, equipment-holding baskets, which obviously creates a holdup in the OR. Or else arrows — the plastic indicators that signal whether a container has been sterilized — would go missing. Like socks from a dryer, load stickers indicating date and time of steriliza- tion could mysteriously disappear as well. And retention plates, which hold a filter in place, sometimes came loose. Some of these issues come down to human error. Others are the result of sealed containers getting knocked around in transport. During my time working with these devices, issues were flagged in 5% of cases. That's way too many. Exacerbating the problem, sealed containers take up a great deal more space than sterile wrap — about 1 1 ⁄2 times as much, by the time you get everything assembled. And as technology advances, surgeons are only going to require more instrumentation. This doesn't just cre- ate a storage issue; it creates a decontamination backlog every time several surgeries finish at once. Sealed containers each add 4 relative- ly large pieces to a washer: the container itself, which can be as big as 30-by-18 inches, the lid, and a square or circular filter retention plate, which varies in size, depending on brand, and consists of 2 pieces. It gets worse: Once a washing is complete and you've reassembled and inspected that container, the better part of an hour has gone by. Compare this to the 3 or so minutes it takes to wrap a tray of instru- ments, and the amount of manpower saved by sterile wrap is clear. As for price, I have seen many ROIs arguing for containers and against them, and for sterile wrap and against it. Sealed containers have a higher upfront cost and additional preventative maintenance costs. Still, some people insist you'll end up paying more for sterile J a n u a r y 2 0 1 7 • O U T PA T I E N TS U R G E R Y. N E T • 1 0 7

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