Michael

Mold In The Healthcare Environment: Keeping Patients and Staff Safe

With the tragic turn of events at Seattle Children’s Hospital, the subject of mold in healthcare environments has taken front-and-center stage all across the country. It’s important to understand that there is always a little mold everywhere indoors – in the air and on most surfaces. Mold spores are brought into the building through various…

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A Winning Plan: Making Process Improvement Possible – Marjorie Wall

When a problem strikes in Sterile Processing or the Operating Room that puts a patient at risk, the knee jerk reaction is to what? To fire the person responsible. On this Season 7 Rewind episode, we talked with a mathematics major on a full…

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ISO Certification for SPD Departments & AAMI/ASTM Updates: Ralph Basile

Regulators want it, healthcare facilities want it, medical device manufacturers want it…what if surgical instrument validation was actually geared toward a specific standard protocol? This re-released Season 1 episode features one of the biggest…

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Third Party Instrument Repair: AMDSO & “The Right to Repair” Debate

Surgical instrument repair questions are such an important part of everything that we do as sterile processing professionals. David Anbari joins us to talk about preventative maintenance, accessibility and the mobile aspect of third party repair…

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Smart Data: The Key to Effective Change Management in the Operating Room

Picture this: your hospital has access to a magic button that would reduce SPD volume by up to 100 trays per week and reduce tray sizes by over 35%. Sound too good to be true? On this release of the Beyond Clean Vendor Spotlight series, we talk…

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One Book to Rule Them All: 5 Creative Ways to Read the AAMI Standards and Not Get Bored

There’s a running joke in literary circles about books that few people have ever read, but every one pretends to  — books like Moby Dick, War and Peace, Atlas Shrugged, and Les Misérables. One reason few of us have ventured to complete these reads is that the books themselves are MASSIVE, and, some may argue, at times, a little…um…boring.  But what about…

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Break “the Rule”: Why the Two-Week Notice is Not Your Friend in CS/SPD

So it’s been a while since I’ve posted anything overtly controversial, but this article may reset that counter back to “0 Days without a Controversy”. Today, I want to talk about quitters. Unless your name is Arlene Scisney (a 30-year veteran instrument tech at Jewish Hospital SPD), chances are high that you have worked at…

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The Power of Words and the Wonder of Wit: 5 Tips on Leveraging Language as an SPD Professional

1) “Like a good neighbor…” 2) “Come on down, you’re the next contestant on…” 3) “Maybe she’s born with it,…” 4) “There’s some things money can’t buy. For everything else…” Chances are very high that if you’ve spent any time in the United States over the past 20 years you can finish at least three…

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Big Fish, Little Pond: How to Become A Key Opinion Leader in the SPD Universe (If You Want To)

As a whole, Sterile Processing professionals are an opinionated group. If you’ve ever sat in a room with other department leaders and talked about anything Sterile Processing related, you probably realized just how deep and diverse our experiences, preferences, and professional outlooks really are. Some of that has to do with the myriad of different…

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“Extremely Dangerous, and Potentially Fatal Outcome for Patients”: Another Anonymous Letter from SPD

(We recently received another anonymous letter from one of our listeners. It is another poignant reminder of the reality of far too many Sterile Processing departments and earnest professionals in our industry. These are the real challenges facing our teams today. We can’t afford to ignore it.) “In reading the anonymous letter to the Sterile…

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