Collapse: Detroit hospital systems broken; no clean surgical instruments
by: Isabelle Z.
NaturalNews.com
Wednesday, September 14, 2016
Many people simply take it for granted that a hospital will have the necessary clean equipment on hand to deal with whatever situations might arise during surgery. However, an unusually high number of errors at The Detroit Medical Center’s Midtown hospitals is giving many patients pause.
These hospitals have been plagued with serious problems pertaining to the proper cleaning and sterilization of surgical instruments and other tools. According to the Detroit News, surgeons and staff members at the hospitals have been complaining for more than a decade about instruments being broken, improperly cleaned and even missing altogether.
Among the complaints are operation problems that range from the fairly routine, such as appendectomies, to serious operations such as spinal fusions and brain surgeries. Some patients had to remain under anesthesia for as long as an hour while staffers scrambled to replace instruments. Others woke up from anesthesia to find out that their operation had been canceled at the last minute – after they had already been put under.
Some of the more shocking cases involve children. For example, open-heart surgery on a 7-month-old girl was interrupted last January when it was discovered that a tube leading to the bypass machine was still clogged with blood from an earlier operation at the Children’s Hospital of Michigan. Old blood and bone can trigger infections, sepsis and even death in patients. That particular hospital registered 186 complaints of dirty, incomplete or missing instrument sets in just a 17-month period.
The problem that has the system on the brink of collapse, appears to stem from Receiving Hospital’s Central Sterile Processing Department. This basement department is responsible for cleaning the instruments used at all five of the DMC center campus hospitals, which carry out a combined total of more than 37,000 operations each year.
The department employs 71 technicians who are paid $18 an hour to clean thousands of instruments each day, placing them in sterile “case carts” and bringing them to operating rooms in just a few hours.
Poor sterilization accuracy rate
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