From the August 2018 issue of HealthCare Business News magazine
Hazard #5: Improper cleaning may cause device malfunctions, equipment failures, and potential for patient injury. One attendee shared the importance of double-checking all stages of the infection control chain, even ones that are seemingly simple. Their facility experienced a malfunction in the mixing system that combined a concentrated cleaning solution with water to form a ready-to-use formulation. Any failure in this mix can be critical: adding too much concentrate into the ready-to-use formulation will result in degrading plastics and other device components over time, and adding in too little concentrate will leave the facility with improperly cleaned and disinfected equipment, raising the potential for hospital-acquired infections.
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Hazard #8. Workarounds can negate the safety advantages of bar-coded medication administration systems. While we’ve known for a while that workarounds flourish when the technology or systems aren’t able to meet the needs of clinical care, one attendee had a clever method for minimizing interruptions to care. When his facility moved to wireless bar code scanners on their mobile workstations, he found that while caregivers liked the added flexibility of being able to scan without a tether, they were often running into “dead” scanners when users forgot to return the wireless scanner to its cradle for charging between uses. Because the scanners and cradles were keyed to each other, it wasn’t possible to easily swap in a new wireless scanner with a fully charged battery. Instead, the HTM department keeps a stock of tethered bar code scanners that can be quickly delivered to the point of care and plugged into the workstations to keep patient care going while the wireless scanner recharges.
Hazard #10. Slow adoption of safer enteral feeding connectors leaves patients at risk. One challenge to switching to the Enfit enteral-only connectors is the challenge of tracking down and swapping out all bags/containers, tubing, accessories, and connectors currently used in conjunction with enteral feeding. One facility reported that they were able to make a switch during a change in their feeding pumps: timing the switch in consumables to a change in the pumps made it easier to ensure that all older, non-Enfit connectors were removed from patient care and storage areas.
As always, we appreciated the animated discussions and great ideas that our attendees brought to the session. We can’t wait to see what we learn at next year’s AAMI conference in Cleveland!
About the author: Erin Sparnon is the engineering manager at ECRI Institute
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