Massachusetts General Hospital, 55 Fruit Street, WHT 400, Boston, MA, 02114, USA.
J Med Syst. 2018 May 28;42(7):116. doi: 10.1007/s10916-018-0976-8.
Being the economic powerhouses of most large medical centers, operating rooms (ORs) require the highest levels of teamwork, communication, and efficiency in order to optimize patient safety and reduce hospital waste. A major component of OR waste comes from unused surgical instrumentation; instruments that are frequently prepared for procedures but are never touched by the surgical team still require a full reprocessing cycle at the conclusion of the case. Based on our own previous successes in the perioperative domain, in this work we detail an initiative that reduces surgical instrumentation waste of video-assisted thoracoscopic surgery (VATS) procedures by placing thoracotomy conversion instrumentation in a standby location and designing a specific instrument kit to be used solely for VATS cases. Our estimates suggest that this initiative will reduce at least 91,800 pounds of unnecessary surgical instrumentation from cycling through our ORs and reprocessing department annually, resulting in increased OR team communication without sacrificing the highest standard of patient safety.
作为大多数大型医疗中心的经济支柱，手术室需要最高水平的团队合作、沟通和效率，以优化患者安全并减少医院浪费。手术室浪费的一个主要部分来自未使用的手术器械；这些器械经常为手术准备，但从未被手术团队使用，在手术结束时仍需要进行完整的再处理循环。基于我们在围手术期领域的以往成功经验，在这项工作中，我们详细介绍了一项举措，即将开胸手术转换器械放置在备用位置，并设计专门的器械包仅用于胸腔镜手术 (VATS) 病例，从而减少视频辅助胸腔镜手术 (VATS) 手术的器械浪费。我们的估计表明，该举措每年将至少减少 91800 磅不必要的手术器械在我们的手术室和再处理部门循环，从而提高手术室团队的沟通效率，同时不牺牲最高标准的患者安全。
