Outpatient Surgery Magazine

Special Outpatient Surgery Edition - Staff & Patient Safety - October 2017

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/880034

Contents of this Issue

Navigation

Page 28 of 76

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

Articles in this issue

Archives of this issue

view archives of Outpatient Surgery Magazine - Special Outpatient Surgery Edition - Staff & Patient Safety - October 2017