Rubber bands!
4 Likes
Foam is a biatch to sterilize. It doesn’t release moisture, so you can’t use the most common initial sterilization method, ethylene oxide; and you can’t use the most common re-sterilization methods, vaporous hydrogen peroxide and autoclave.
Inclusion of foam on a medical device guarantees that it will be single-use, so much so that manufacturers will include it as a way of enforcing single-use for a device that hospitals tend to resterilize.
It’s not impossible, but it means that the procedure pack will need to be gamma sterilized instead of EtO, which is more expensive, and the foam cutout would need to be tossed every time.
8 Likes
Um, I had a stent put in a few years ago, within 24 hours I was back in the cath lab because something was wrong and the surgeon wanted to check the stent.
I was billed and insurance was billed.
I paid and insurance paid.
5 Likes
I’ve got a socket set and a bit-driver set where their respective cases both have designated spaces to hold each & every piece. Just because they’re set up this way, I’m good about putting each thing back whence it came, as opposed to the loose screwdrivers wrenches etc. that just get tossed back into the tool drawer.
But for the past couple of years, I’m not the only one who uses the tools. The bit-driver set has been missing a couple of Torx bits for a while; I found one in the driveway the other day (where Mom could run over it, and get it lodged into her tire on her way to her 7am shift). I’m looking across the table at the culprit right now…
When I saw the headline, I was going to reply “this really isn’t that unusual” except, yeah, usually it’s gauze/sponge, and not a utensil.
5 Likes
That bill was fraudulent, then. Unless they diagnosed and/or treated a different artery. That’s one way to get around it. If they stented your right coronary and subsequently found disease in your left coronary, then that would be billable. As a patient, I would push back on that 2nd charge because there is no way they should have missed disease in a second vessel. That would frankly be incompetent.
7 Likes
Maybe it’s supposed to work that way but in the real world not so much.
4 Likes
Unfortunately, if the hospital was audited by the payer and that charge was reversed, they don’t usually notify the patient. So from that perspective, you’re right: neither the hospital or insurance have the patient’s well being in mind. Not once you leave the direct care of the nurses/physician/techs and are in the billing system.
7 Likes
Roseanne Barr once had a scalpel sewn inside of her face after already intensive plastic surgery. I guess these things just happen, right?
Just the blade… and not the entire instrument. Right? 
I’ve read this anecdote several times over the years and automatically imagined the level of negligence was such that they left the whole scalpel in there. I hope it was just the blade. But everything I’ve ever seen just says “scalpel.”
It’s pretty hard to lose the blade off of a scalpel. They lock in pretty well. You would think it should be hard to lose something that big, but abdominal surgeries can involve a very large expanse!
3 Likes
Yeah, but this was her face…
1 Like
6 Likes
They could leave several instruments in my abdomen and not even notice.
3 Likes
I was using surgery as an example for my daughters of the imortance of checklists and procedure when doing routine tasks, especially those you think you know well enough to space out during.
I personally once irretrievably deleted 50,000 critical data records during a routine deduplication because I broke two of my own rules of always viewing a set of records based on selection criteria before deleting based that criteria, and of course, running a point-in time backup before a deduplication… that was 3 months of my life, and reputation I’ll never get back…
I also think this has to do with being exhausted and in the final stretch of a long task and letting your form slack. I always keep in mind my cross country coach telling me that when you’re tired and in the last half mile, that’s when it’s most important to keep your form
9 Likes
Those sonic tools look amazing! Organizing my tools just never works for me. I start with grand aspirations then each new drawer /organizer eventually decends into a chaotic mix of semi related tools.
Now to figure out how to afford them… Any hints on good lottery numbers 
1 Like
This could be one of those little things that differ internationally, but at least around here fully dispoable scalpels with permanently molded grips have been standard for serious surgery for decades.
1 Like
when people said she had a sharp tongue. it wasn’t meant to be taken literally 
3 Likes
This topic was automatically closed after 5 days. New replies are no longer allowed.
