Lost instruments..........

I have been in charge of ordering instruments for the past 5 years and TC and others seem to always disappear. I don't mind the TC so much as I do much more expensive items. I just try to remind everybody on a constant basis to be careful and it seems that has helped some. The other problem is dirty sets seem to lie around CS for awhile before anyone notices anything missing, so the trash can't be checked. Also are items missing from sets that aren't counted at the end of a procedure that doesn't require a count? These instruments are like the proverbial lost "sock" from the dryer, went in but never came out!

We are having this problem also and the new director put a policy in place. All trays have count sheets signed off by the instrument person before steralizing. We have to count the tray and sign off that it is correctly loaded before procedure starts. (The tech only, if not a counted case). We call the IT to the room if not correct. After the case, The IT rechecks and if an instrument is missing, they come looking for us. Nothing much we can do about it at that point, but we get warned and hopefully we will be more careful. We were so excited to have an extra step added to our turnovers!

I was watching 2020 a while ago and they where talking about lost insturments in the OR and the hosptial tred out a new bar code systems and your scan the insturment under the bar code reader and it keeps track of all of the insturments. the hosptial did a trial period wiht putting abar code on the insturment and then scaning it into a computer that keeps track of the insturments.

I have a friend who is the maintenace manager for a local healthcare linen place (you know where they send the scrubs out to be cleaned) You would be amazed at how many instruments of all types they find in the scrub pockets. He's got a couple of five gallon buckets of them at the plant and we each have a a selection of clamps and twezers and stuff we use when we do mechanical work.

does your facility have any "tricks" or ideas on how to combat the towel clips or other misc instruments that we constantly seem to eat and have to reorder??

The way our scanning system goes, the tray with the missing instruments can be tracked back to the cart, which will be tracked back to the case, and THEN under the computer record it'll say who set up the case. And that person is approached about what is missing.

Which is why we had only one case of an instrument disappearing last year.

Does any of you remember the "hippy" days? We were suddenly missing instruments on the OB floor (mostly Kellys and the like). We discovered that one of the students was working in a volunteer clinic downtown and we suspected she was doing a little "requisitioning" from our stock. We sat the students down and had a chat about costs and budgets and such and the losses went way down after that.