O C T O B E R 2 0 1 7 O U T P A T I E N TS U R G E R Y. N E T 2 9
issues had dramatically
improved. "Thank you for
doing this," she said. "I
feel much better."
Before we implemented
our policy, I'd always said
that effective smoke
evacuation is good for the
patient. It is, but patients
are exposed to smoke only for the length of their surgeries,
which is likely to have a fairly minimal impact. The effect
on staff, however, can be tremendous. Nurses and techs
might be in an OR for as long as 12 hours on a given day. Multiply that over the
course of many years, and it adds up to unacceptably dangerous levels of expo-
sure for staff members who work hard every day and who rightfully expect that
you'll make safeguarding their health a top priority. If you're still letting surgical
smoke waft through your ORs, here's how to clear the air once and for all.
1
Commit to the effort
There's no better time than today to protect your team from the dangers
of surgical smoke. In our case, I'd heard about AORN's "Go Clear" surgi-
cal smoke-free recognition program, and we volunteered to be a beta site.
Facility-wide commitment and support are obviously important for many rea-
sons, including the fact that some capital purchases may be necessary. In our
case, we were fortunate that we already had smoke evacuators in every OR. We
just weren't using them!
It's best if you assemble an implementation team, including surgeons and
anesthesia champions, to help put the pieces of the smoke-free program togeth-
er. Surgeons can be a hard sell, but once my chief of surgery, a very busy ortho-
COLD TURKEY Mandate the
use of smoke evacuators and
limit the options surgeons
have to comply with the policy.
Todd
Wilkinson,
RN