Lost.
New technology can make sponges left in patients a thing of the past.
Archives of Surgery
In the turmoil and confusion of an emergency operating room, it is not surprising for occasional surgical sponge to go missing. But when the sponge is left inside a patient, there is no harmless error. Now there may be a way to detect stray sponges before the patient leaves the OR. radio frequency ID (RFID), as those used to prevent shoplifting, can be sewn in surgical sponges, according to a new study. If the idea catches on, the technology could prevent hundreds of infections and deaths caused by forgotten sponges every year.
surgical sponges are small plots gauze used to absorb fluid, wipe instruments, and able to support the body's tissues during surgery. The average abdominal surgery uses about 50 sponges. the operating room nurses count the sponges before and after surgery to ensure that none have gone, but in an emergency or complex surgery, it can be difficult to keep track of exactly how sponges were used and where they all went. Very occasionally - only about 1 in every 16,000 surgeries -. A sponge is accidentally left inside the patient's body, which leads to a potentially serious infection
In that month's number Archives of Surgery , Alex Macario surgeon to Stanford University School of Medicine in Palo Alto, California, and colleagues describe a monitoring system that they hope to eliminate that risk. An RFID tag sewn into each surgical sponge acts as a tracking device. To test the technology, a surgeon placed a sponge marked somewhere in the body cavity of an abdominal surgery patient who had consented to the study. A second surgeon, who did not see where the sponge was hidden, waving an RFID detection wand over the patient's abdomen. When the rod was marked directly on the RFID sponge, the RFID chip picked up radio waves the wand and sent a signal, making the wand beep. In four trials with a total of 8 patients, the surgeon can locate the sponge hidden in less than three seconds each time.
"This is a proof of concept very nice," said Atul Gawande, a surgeon at Brigham Women's Hospital in Boston and Harvard School of Public Health. The RFID technology is very fast, adds, but unless the RFID tags are very cheap, it could be costly. - the US uses about 2 billion surgical sponges annually RFID sponges developed by ClearCount Medical Solutions, which hopes to make the technology available fall.
related site
- case study of a surgical sponge restraint
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