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.
It’s hard to tell exactly what happened here, but that seems by design, as the hospital is wording this very, very carefully:
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.