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Bar Codes Keep Surgical Objects Outside Patients
Reservoir Hill writes "Every year about 1,500 people in the US have surgical objects accidentally left inside them after surgery, according to medical studies. To prevent this potentially deadly problem, Loyola University Medical Center is utilizing a new technology that is helping its surgical teams keep track of all sponges used during a surgical procedure. Each sponge has a unique bar code affixed to it that is scanned by a high-tech device to obtain a count. Before a procedure begins, the identification number of the patient and the badge of the surgical team member maintaining the count are scanned into the counter. When a sponge is removed from a patient, it is scanned back into the system. A surgical procedure cannot end until all sponges are accounted for."
Reference counting. Insert obvious garbage collection joke here.
Tee hee.
There is another kind of evil which we must fear most, and that is the indifference of good men. -- Boondock Saints
I'd prefer a doctor operating one me to pay attention to the patient not pause to remember if this was the 16th sponge he took out or if the 16th was the one he took out 10 minutes ago.
So until you have a medical degree and the years of on the job experience that it takes to even set foot in a surgery, you don't get to call anyone an idiot that does.
Doing otherwise makes you look like a typical fat,lazy, IGNORANT armchair skeptic who can't even be bothered to use the slightest bit of brain power their pathetic brain is capable of mustering.
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
I have enough trouble getting these things to scan under ideal conditions at the grocery store let alone after being pulled used and bloodied from the body of a patient.
Sanity is a sandbox. I prefer the swings.
Well, I laughed at the bottom of the post where it said
(tagging beta)
I work at a Level 1 trauma center and we do indeed use RFID sponges. Currently we are only using them on a trial basis for trauma surgeries, but I would guess that once the cost drops some, we will infact use them for all surgeries. The RFID wands cost about $50.($135 patient cost). Sponges are bad, but the body will encapsulate them after awhile....retractors on the other hand....I don't know how the hell you leave something 1 foot long and 1.5 inches wide in someone...that boggles the mind. As someone said earlier though, when you have multiple surgeons, multiple residents, multiple scrub techs and circulators, things will get missed. Ofcourse the worst thing is what people call it when something is left in a patient or something goes wrong, a "surgical misadventure" that is just wrong.
We do all make mistakes, and surgeons are no exception.
I had a laproscopic procedure done a few years back and in the end I developed and abdominal infection. The surgeon had done his work, as had the hospital, but bacteria are microscopic. And, sometimes, the procedure just has a mistake.
As best as the surgeon could guess, there must have been some bacteria on one of the instruments despite all of the precautions. Shortly afterwards, though he didn't say so, I could tell that he was worried. Once I made it clear that I had no intentions of suing him, he became far more relaxed.
I don't blame him, and told him as much. Sometimes, even when you follow all of the proper procedures, things don't turn out right. It's unfortunate, but it doesn't mean he did it through incompetence or malice. Perhaps I would feel differently if it hadn't turned out well enough in the end, but given the amount of medical procedures I've been through, I expect I would have felt this way regardless.
Elrond, Duke of URL
"This is the most fun I've had without being drenched in the blood of my enemies!"-Sam&Max
An RFID solution for this problem already exists. Surgical equipment and gauze and sponges are manufactured with a tag inside, or sewn on. A wand shaped like a loop is waved over the patient before the surgeon closes to make sure all foreign material is removed.
I'm posting anonymously but I have a very low 4-digit ID...
I've been on Slashdot long before I ever started medical school and I always knew people talk out of their element here, but medicine is what I do and I've cringed quite a bit.
Very simply, depending on hospital policy, there are a number of scrub nurses who keep a count of sponges. They are removed in packs of 5, counted, recounted, and checked by at least two team members. As sponges are removed, they are packed in groups of 5 and discarded. A running tally is kept on a white-board by someone who isn't scrubbed in. Albeit mistakes do happen once in a while, but they are very rare.
This system seems quite complicated and I don't see any advantage in an OR, but this will ease the general public because it uses some fancy technology. What most of the public doesn't remember is doctors/surgeons are humans too. We can make mistakes so we have numerous people double-checking counts. Adding additional steps into the process with bar-code scanners only complicates things and introduces further possibility of errors. I prefer things the old fashioned way. Then again, most of my colleagues are also hell bent on sticking to the old ways.
Oh and Slashdot... please stop with the non-sense. Most of you are software or hardware nerds. You're not lawyers, doctors or surgeons. Leave the arm-chair medicine to someone more qualified such as my colleagues. Honestly, some of these comments are embarrassing.
See how completely unreasonable that would be? I should be clear that I'm not bagging on lawyers here, but using them as an example of how another profession might be held to ridiculous standards of perfection. M&M conferences would be a far more effective learning tool if there was no sense of blame, and doctors could freely help their colleagues learn from prior mistakes.
P.P.S. I'm doing Science and I'm still alive.
In Soviet Russia, surgery is for implanting RFID tracking objects in you!
Unfortunately, the process of sterilization tends to completely destroy even the simplest of technology. Most hospitals use pressurized steam autoclaves. They would have to switch to an Ethylene oxide autoclave, which has a seriously large number of risks associated with it. Not to mention that the main byproduct of a single run is the chenical equivalent of antifreeze, but having a few canisters of this stuff lying around is enough to wipe out a city block's worth of people if it popped. This might be reasonable for the factory that makes the sponges since they can closely control the process, but there are a heck of a lot of items in use in the OR, so it would only address a small number of items.
Instruments make up the bulk of the "things" used in a procedure. The emerging tech for tracking those is called dot peen marking. It's mostly designed to help the Central Supply staff (who clean and sterilize equipment) keep their sets together and track where things are in the overall process.
I have an idea, call me a radical. You take a slip of paper and two bowls. You count the sponges before the operation, and write the number on the paper and put the paper and the clean sponges in bowl 1. You put the used sponges in bowl 2. The operation cannot be completed until the number of sponges in the bowls matches that on the piece of paper. Come on, folks, why do you need a bar code scanner, how does that make this easier? The only advantage of the scanner is that it prevents doctors from lying and saying they counted them -- apparently it's a real possibility, or they would just count them.
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