For more than a decade, Dertoit medical center CMD has consistently struggled to provide surgeons and other healthcare professionals with sanitary instruments, exposing untold thousands of patients to infection and communicable disease.
A series of reports published last month by a local Detroit agency claims that nurses and surgeons have consistently filed complaints over at least the last 11 years to CMD and its parent for-profit company, Dallas-based Tenet Healthcare.
Reports represented by the news describe a chaotic system in which medical professionals open their supposedly sterilized tool kits and find old blood, bone or other materials from previous surgeries on their instruments often. Of course, blood and bone, even after sterilization procedures, are considered a biohazard and present a risk of infection or septic shock.
DMC surgeons have reported anesthetizing a patient, then opening their tools and realizing they have to wait an hour - with the patient still under anesthesia - to get, clean disinfected instruments or risk harming someone potentially. Worse still, when sanitary tools cannot be obtained in a timely manner, surgeries are cancelled at the last minute, sometimes even after patients have been put under anesthesia. DMC's internal data suggests this happens up to ten times a week.
One anonymous surgeon told the Detroit News, "Sometimes I've operated on him and thought, 'Maybe I wouldn't have done it. "
Instruments and tools for the five CMD hospitals ( Detroit Reception, Harper University Hospital, Hutzel Women, CMD Heart, and Detroit Children's Hospital) are supposed to be sterilized by the Sterile Department '' Central Processing '' , which claims it is struggling to staff with qualified candidates.
These facts should give pause to millions of Americans who simply assume that, by virtue of going to an American hospital, they are receiving the best possible care. In the absence of proper sterile practice, surgery can easily become more dangerous than beneficial. This is especially true when dealing with the weakest immune systems of children or the elderly, those who are the most fragile to begin with.
MadgeTech , whose representative in Tunisia is AFRIMESURE, manufactures a variety of data loggers that support medical sterilization to protect public health.
The MadgeTech Autoclave Validation System (AVS) contains five HiTemp140 data loggers to map and measure temperatures across an autoclave chamber during sterilization cycles, and a pressure logger to confirm that the correct pressure is achieved.
These small but powerful data loggers keep patients safe from infection, doctors safe from malpractice claims, and medical facilities safe from P.R. nightmares like the one DCMD is currently experiencing.
