It’s hard to tell exactly what happened here, but that seems by design, as the hospital is wording this very, very carefully:
“Earlier this year, Salem Hospital was made aware of an isolated practice involving a small portion of endoscopy patients who were potentially exposed to infection due to the administration of their intravenous medication in a manner not consistent with our best practice,”
The practice involved a single contracted individual who no longer works at Salem Hospital
a patient . . . was told a piece of equipment intended for single use had been reused for his procedure. It was not the IV needle or endoscopy tube that was reused but a different piece of equipment needed to administer anesthesia.
Even so, this pretty much confirms it was one employee and their personal handling of patients’ IV anesthesia.
IVs are not complex, and while the IV needle is the one that goes into the patient, it may not be the only needle involved, as drugs can also be introduced by needle via a port on the tubing and mixed with the IV solution before it goes into the patient.
Because this is limited to one employee and specifically anesthetics, it’s possible that the problem was drug diversion by an employee who was dispensing the patient’s drugs to self prior to dispensing to the patient, who became second in line to the employee using that same vial and perhaps even that same syringe before injecting it into the patient’s IV port as prescribed.
That’s just a guess, but it has happened before. If this is what the “single contracted individual” has been caught doing, and has tested positive for hepatitis and HIV, then legally the hospital has to assume that ALL that person’s patients were potentially infected with both, and by the same IV route, until enough time has elapsed that effective testing can be done to rule it in or out for each patient.
TL;DR: Probably NOT an autoclave problem, sorry to say.
Well it wasn’t a reused needle or bad blood. I wonder what it ended up being.
Sounds like a syringe being reused.
450 times?!
Since it’s IV medication given before/during an endoscopy, I’d guess it’s the syringe used to flush the IV line.
Not the same one 450 times, but an employee using the same one for multiple patients in a day, then tossing it instead of using a new one for each.
MY TURN!
unbridled pharmacy rage
It says it was something used to administer the anesthesic, but I don’t know anything about that either.
This is baffling to me because almost all medical equipment is either single use or goes in the autoclave. How did this even go on for as long as it did?
I just wrote a longer comment upthread, but one possible answer is drug diversion by an employee, filling the syringe and then injecting self with some of it before injecting the IV port.
You know that seems very much a possibility. I used to work in toxicology in a hospital setting and did these sorts of work up. And I’ve seen some crazy shit with that. Here I was thinking they were being cheap and trying to reuse a certain type of connection device. But there’s no way that such a single use device would last for the time period stated. On the other hand if an employee was the source of contamination that would make way more sense.
I can’t tell if this is the incompetence or malice
Not the onion
