A surgeon at a crisis-hit NHS trust used a Swiss Army penknife to open up the chest of a patient because he claimed he could not find a sterile scalpel.
University Hospitals Sussex has said the operation was an emergency, but the surgeon’s actions were “outside normal procedures and should not have been necessary”.From my limited experience of theatre work in the 1980s two people would be responsible for the contents of the operation instrument tray. This stainless steel tray would come up from the sterilising dept wrapped in a sterilised cloth into the appropriate theatre. Each operation has it's own instruments which are removed after surgical procedures, sent to the sterilsing dept etc..
Those two scrub nurses would examine the tray of instruments and count them. All instruments, staples etc. were counted out and counted back onto the tray ......... if any equipment was not correct or present, that tray would be re-wrapped and sent back to the sterilising dept. requesting the correct instruments on the next tray. As far as I remember the patient would not be anaesthised until the correct equipment was available.
SO : how the H*** does a Surgeon get away with this!
. Once I could probably understand but with a Team around ........
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Topic: NHS hospital procedure: It gets worse ........ (Read 2020 times)