Outpatient Surgery Magazine, providing current information on Surgical Services, Surgical Facility Administration, Outpatient Surgery News and Trends, OR Excellence and more.
Issue link: http://outpatientsurgery.uberflip.com/i/771117
ing the potential for SSIs. A flood of lawsuits filed against 3M, the maker of the industry's most-used warming system, the FDA-approved Bair Hugger, allege the forced-air system has caused some patients to develop deep-joint infections that have resulted in tragic outcomes, such as amputation and multiple follow-up surgeries, including the removal of implants. 3M has refuted the claims as "baseless" and offered numerous clinical studies to prove the technology's safety and efficacy. ECRI Institute, a highly-regarded laboratory for testing medical products, found "insuf- ficient evidence to establish that the use of [forced-air warming] sys- tems leads to an increase in SSIs compared to other warming meth- ods." Where there's smoke, there's fire So has the debate affected the industry's faith in forced air, which has been used to warm hundreds of millions of patients in hospitals and surgery centers around the world? Based on interviews with surgical facility leaders across the country, not really, though some are cur- rently investigating alternatives to forced air in light of the allegations. Nalan Narine, MD, an anesthesiologist with Loma Linda University Medical Center-Murrieta (Calif.), takes a balanced approach to patient warming: forced-air warming blankets, as well as an underbody water blanket, warm IV fluids and airway humidification, plus a plastic head cover, "because the head represents the biggest part of heat loss," he says. He thinks forced air could one day be a "thing of the past," sup- planted by other modalities. He also poses a bigger question. "This is all very controversial, but does warming a patient decrease SSIs or infection rates? I don't know that it does," he says. "There are some very good reasons to warm patients — comfort level is one of them — but I think we're going to be seeing a lot of changes to periop- 1 3 2 • O U T PA T I E N T S U R G E R Y M A G A Z I N E • J a n u a r y 2 0 1 7