Hospitals Save Money, But Safety Is Questioned

[MountainLaurel]

Another evil of social goods such as health care being tied to a profit motive.

A growing number of U.S. hospitals, including at least eight in the Washington area, are saving money by reusing medical devices designated for one-time use, ignoring the warnings of manufacturers, which will not vouch for the safety of their reconditioned products.

Hospitals are not required to tell patients that reconditioned devices will be used in surgery -- surgeons themselves often do not know. The Food and Drug Administration regulates the practice, and many hospital administrators say reusing single-use devices is not only cost effective but also poses no threat to patients because the instruments are cleaned with such care that they are as good as new.

But single-use devices have malfunctioned during reuse, federal records and interviews show. In one instance, an electrode from a catheter broke off in a patient's heart. In another, a patient's eyeball was impaled. And an infant who for months gagged and retched on a resterilized tracheal tube now can take food only from a tube attached to his stomach.

Based on available data, it is impossible to compare how often single-use devices malfunction in their first operation versus subsequent uses. That is because the FDA, which devotes few resources to overseeing what is now a fast-growing industry, began requiring only last year that hospitals report whether a malfunctioning device had been reprocessed.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/12/10/AR2005121001213.html

[Warpy]

1. Uh-huh, they got to a point where they couldn't suck profit

out of the system off the backs of overworked nursing staff, I guess this next thing was inevitable.

We're heading into a total third world system very quickly, and the reason is spelled p-r-o-f-i-t. Taking profit out of any system degrades service. This is annoying in a retail store, it's deadly in healthcare.