ECRI Institute names top 10 medtech hazards
This article was originally published in The Gray Sheet
Executive Summary
Widespread failure to follow established cleaning and sterilization guidelines during reprocessing helped place "cross-contamination from flexible endoscopes" at the head of ECRI's list of the 2010 Top 10 Technology Hazards, released Dec. 2 by the nonprofit research group. "The best defense against endoscopy-related cross-contamination continues to be careful development of and strict adherence to comprehensive, model-specific reprocessing protocols," ECRI writes. Alarm hazards come in second on the list, and can be minimized if hospitals look for designs that limit nuisance alarms, which can desensitize staff, "possibly leading them to ignore true hazards," the report advises. Other top 10 hazards for health care providers to monitor include surgical fires; radiation from computed tomography, which the report suggests could be responsible for 6,000 additional cancers each year; devices or fragments left in patients following surgery; needlesticks or other sharps injuries; data communication errors with computerized equipment and systems; surgical stapler hazards; and ferromagnetic objects that can become magnetized in a magnetic resonance imaging environment