Regulatory requirements, such as the Joint Commission and the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, require regular safety checks to ensure patient safety. The Nursing Practice Act also requires that nurses safely operate all equipment and properly use medical devices during patient care. When a new equipment is introduced into the patient care area, a competency check must be connected to the responsible personnel who will use the equipment. This verification verification is usually stored in the employee’s personal file for later use if necessary.
Nurses study for some time during training to always look at the electrical cords of all the equipment, because wearing cord is a potential fire hazard. This remains true. The temperature of the solutions used in heating and cooling pads or blankets can also pose a risk of injury to the patient if the fluid is too hot or too cold. Burns are directed from improper temperature regulation associated with various devices for treating patients. As crazy as it may seem, a simple non-invasive blood pressure cuff caused damage to the patient. The device inflated to extreme pressures with interruptions for a certain period of time, which extremely resulted in permanent damage to the nerve by the patient’s hand, which resulted in a clawed hand. The list of equipment often involved in patient care includes, among others, the following: volumetric infusion pumps, patient-controlled analgesic pumps, devices for monitoring blood glucose, heating pads, cooling / heating blankets, non-invasive blood pressure cuffs , nasal cannula, night immobilizers, patient elevators and continuous positive airway pressure machines. Wound exposing the Achilles tendon of an elderly person, directed from the leg immobilizer. The patient's skin was not checked on a regular basis and ordered by the doctor for the disorder.
Cyber risk
It seems clear that periodic periodic testing of equipment and / or medical devices is a patient safety issue. Verifying or evaluating the proper functioning of medical equipment should be an additional factor during or immediately after a rapid response event. We live in a world where amazing cyber technology exists, so health care providers should now consider the possibility that technical equipment might not work properly, which could come from a cyber source. This feature has never been considered before. Hacking Healthcare IT in 2016 was published by the Institute of Critical Infrastructure, describing how devices that have a blue tooth and have access to the Internet, such as an automatic implantable cardioverter-defibrillator and pacemakers, patient-controlled analgesic pumps and insulin pumps are at risk for breaking or reprogramming.
Act:
1. Be vigilant and open to the possibility of factors that have never been taken into account.
2. Inspect the equipment in the room during the event and carefully inspect it as soon as possible after a rapid response situation or code. If in doubt, remove equipment from circulation; send it to a biomedical technique for verification and record your actions in an incident report, incident report or deviation report (no matter what your institution may call a form). Let professionals trained in biomedical engineering determine when to return equipment related to existing stocks.
3. Double check the speed of taking medication programmed in infusion pumps. Sometimes programming is wrong and guesses who will be held accountable? Correctly! Double-check the pumps by calculating the math yourself.
4. Record the temperature on any equipment or device that displays the temperature. For example: fluid heaters, blanket / pillow heaters, heating / cooling blankets, cot heaters, etc. When the temperature is recorded, the medical record conveys that the health care provider is paying attention to details that will support your clinical competence, if will be in doubt.
