“Help, someone, I’ve been stabbed”! This is something a medical professional may have to deal with when working in an Emergency Room. As medical professionals, it is their job to cure the ailment, not create more. In this, there are a couple of ways that medical personnel can cure and prevent ailments instead of create and spread them.
Firstly, anything that enters a sanitary part of the body needs to be properly sanitized. By properly sanitizing and setting up a tray to be used, it protects the patient from anything the doctor may have on his hands. A sterilized tray is set up with a sterile drape, sterile gloves, and sterile utensils that will need to be used. If one of these things is contaminated, the whole tray must be replaced because the one thing that was contaminated has essentially contaminated all instruments on the table.
To properly sanitize instruments, one may use a centrifuge. This is a devise that a medical professional put instruments in to and it uses distilled water and heat to clean and sanitize the instruments. The instruments that go into the centrifuge have to be in there for thirty minutes, and then they must be labeled and used within thirty days of sanitization.
If someone forgets to label the instruments coming out of the centrifuge, the instrument must be put into the centrifuge again, and then properly labeled with date and initials of the person who centrifuged it.Also, if the thirty days has expired, the instrument must again be reentered into the centrifuge for sanitization because the package that the instrument is in will have moisture in it that makes it unsanitary.
Next, by properly sanitizing the instruments that enter a person’s body, one has not only insured the patient that they will eventually get better, but also given the doctor using these utensils the knowledge that nothing more will enter this person’s body such as bacteria that will harm them further. Lastly, not only does the patients life sometimes depend on whether or not the instruments that enter his/her body are sanitized, but so often does the doctor and his staff’s career depend on it. This meaning that, if a patient is infected by an unsanitary tool once, the doctor’s office can claim a mistake.
However, if it happens more than once, the patients are going to talk to each other, and the doctor’s office is going to get a reputation of not treating their patients with the proper care. This affects the doctor, but more importantly the doctor’s other staff. This meaning that if his staff was to go and try and find another job, it may be difficult because of the office’s reputation, because some of that responsibility falls of the other staff instead of just the doctor.
To conclude, sanitization in the healthcare field does not just affect the patient, it is important to everyone involved.