Letters & E-mails

Outpatient Surgery Editors

Experience Under Your Belt vs. Titles After Your Name
• Re: "In Search of the Perfect OR Nurse" (December, page 14). I have been an OR nurse in one capacity or another for 30 years and currently am director of a 4-room orthopedic ASC. Not a day goes by that I'm not in the OR troubleshooting or fixing something so the day can go on. Staff bring me screws, washers and other various items they find on the floor that they don't know what to do with. How about finding out where it came from before you bring it to the office? Then maybe we can prevent a major malfunction down the road in the middle of a case. And heaven forbid you throw it away or put it in a drawer somewhere. Gone are the days of pride in the place you work and wanting to keep it looking nice and fully functional.

Karen Gabbert, RN, BSN
Surgery Center of Kansas
Wichita, Kans.
karengabbert@koc-pa.com

Nursing has become a profession of titles. The more titles you acquire, the higher you expect your salary to be — regardless of your real nursing experience or the ownership and pride you take in your job.

Maria Gutierrez, RN
Moore County Hospital District
Dumas, Texas
mgutierrez@mchd.net

InstaPoll

TIME BANDITS Of all the distractions you face in your job, office drop-ins (staff, surgeons, vendors) ranked No. 1 in a poll of 409 facility managers.

What steals the most minutes away from your days?

Office drop-ins	37%
E-mail	26%
Meetings	23%
Phone calls	14%
Facebook	0%

Source: Outpatient Surgery Magazine InstaPoll (www.outpatientsurgery.net), January 2013, n=409

Not Safe to Reuse Drapes
• Re: "5 Easy Ways to Save on Surgical Supplies" (January, page 67). The suggestion to reuse drapes out of sterile packs that weren't used or touched on the field for other "clean" procedures, such as ENT cases, is way out of touch with infection control prevention. Any pack that is opened belongs solely to the patient in the room. Items should not be removed and deemed "clean" or "non-contaminated" by staff to use on other patients. This is not the same as sending extra products to a third-party reprocesser to be resterilized using approved guidelines. This is simply choosing to use a patient's unused drapes for another patient's procedure. (Next will we share unused tissue boxes in the ICU from patient to patient?) If you do not need it, throw it out. If you are finding this happens often, save money by removing it from your pack.

Jude Johnston, RN
Johnston & Johnston Surgical Sales and Consulting
West Chester, Pa.
judejohnston@verizon.net