Posted on 10/06/2009 6:48:13 AM PDT by rawhide
FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla. — More than 1,800 patients treated by one nurse at a South Florida hospital may have been exposed to HIV and hepatitis.
Broward General Medical Center said Monday the nurse reused saline bags and tubing during cardiac stress tests involving the injection of fluids.
The hospital has sent letters to all 1,851 people who may have been affected from January 2004 to early September.
Hospital officials say the risk of exposure is low, but all affected patients should be tested for HIV and hepatitis B and C.
The nurse, who has not been identified, resigned and was reported to the Board of Nursing.
The hospital discovered the problem after a patient noticed the nurse misusing the equipment and anonymously called in.
I can just imagine the all the hell the former patients have to be going through not knowing what will happen to them, all because of what this nurse had been doing going on 6 years. You would think other nurses stationed with her would have discovered this long before the patient did? Just saying.
“the nurse reused saline bags and tubing during cardiac stress tests involving the injection of fluids.”
Why??
I'll wager the nurse was not born in the United States.
You may be a winner!
I don’t think it is very easy to refill one of those bags.
I think they’re sealed and disposable.
She/he ought to be arrested!
No other explanation but sheer laziness IMHO.
Ignorance rose up in the ranks, or rather lack of professionalism.
Horrible is the only way to describe being on the other end of that phone call.
Lawyers are probably killing each other to get to these people.
Took them home and sold it on Ebay is one guess...
Practicing for Obamacare is another...
I’d check the drug cabinet, too.
This nurse shouldn’t just be fired, or allowed to resign; Cokie Roberts should shoot take this nurse out and shoot her/him after she gets done earholing that rape-rapist Polanski. (http://blogs.abcnews.com/george/2009/10/cokie-on-polanski-just-take-him-out-and-shoot-him.html)
Get used to it in GovCare. Back in the 80’s in the USSR, the approved custom of reusing needles was the leading vector for HIV tranmission.
One must be frugal with the State’s resources, after all.
Wait until ACORN/SEIU is running healthcare. It will be far far worse. Keep calling and faxing.
Headline should read: 1,800 patients exposed to harmless, ubiquitous, 9kilobase retrovirus; HepB deemed serious. No intact HepC virus ever isolated.
There, that should cover it.
Refilling a saline bag sounds vastly more difficult than just grabbing a fresh, full one from wherever they are stored. Something besides laziness was happening and I bet that it wasn't the nurse's decision but someone higher up.
Any bets on whether they billed the patients' insurance for a fresh saline bag for each patient?
Of course they did!
I am a nurse. Believe me, this wasn’t laziness. It’s far easier to use new sterile pre-filled bags and prepackaged tubing than to reuse them. She would have had to refill the bags. I would also assume she would have at least tried to sterilize or wash the tubing, as this would be the common practice in some hospitals south of the border.
I’m gussing this nurse was not trained in the USA.
“the nurse reused saline bags and tubing during cardiac stress tests involving the injection of fluids.”
...these are the kinds of “money saving” techniques being used by Canadian and British socialized medicine.
But six years? Sure, I can understand using your old country's procedures the first few times until corrected, but that doesn't happen for six years unless it has the approval of those at the top to save the hospital money (but still bill for full sterile service).
Is there any information that indicates that there was actual HIV/Hep B exposure at any time or just that some equipment was reused? Are there confirmed HIV/HBV contaminations or is this all speculative and preventative?
It would be pretty hard to transmit HIV or HBV from used bags or tubing.
Could be. I missed the six year part.
I wonder if this nurse was reusing the needles also?
Probably risk of litigation more than risk of infection. HIV is more difficult to transmit than most people know.
Freepers are not immune from ingnorance induced panic common to the public at large.
I just assumed this meant she didn’t throw a bag away, just hooked a partially used bag up to the next patient.
Well if this was for stress tests, then I’m guessing not all the bag of saline was used on a patient. Clamp it off, cap it and then attach the same bag to the next patient. Sort of an assembly line style. I agree with the laziness theory.
I hope she used a new needle..........
she had to have used new needles........needles retract now and once the catheter is in the patient the next needle would have a new catheter.......but that line where it attaches to the catheter from the bag would be infected....leaving patients at risk.
Third world nurse hireling
So will nurse Lopez/Gonzalez/Ramirez be prosecuted?
I would error on the side of caution, not because I am ignorant! I would not want to assume the risk in this case, no matter how small the risk may be, nor thinking of how difficult it may be to infect me.
used needles or blood back flows?
I know several nurses who STRONGLY agree with this statment, including a nurse at a STD clinic.
She said if you got HIV you had gay homo sex (catcher NOT pitcher) or shared a needle with an HIV infected buddy. period. Any other way was hundreds of thousands of times less likely.
Horrid no matter how you cut it. Horrid!
So is it unprofessional behavior on the part of the nurse or will she point at the hospital.
This is absolutely insane. The lawsuits must be stacking up already.
HIV doesn’t live outside the body well at all, it is realtively fragile as compared to HBV.
I’m not EXACLTY current on this, but at one time occupational needlestick incident rates were about 3% of those actually stuck with an HIV contaminated needle.
Female to male transmission is almost impossible; last year I had to reasearch it and found only a few documented cases worldwide and then it took some extreme measures.
As another poster pointed out, M-M sex and sharing infected needles are by far the most common method of transmission, although M-F transmission does happen. The “receiving” party in sex is much much much more at risk than is the “giving” party.
Door knobs, keyboards, toilet seats, handshakes, kisses, etc are not transmission vehicles.
The article did not mention re using needles.
There would be absolutely no reason for blood to backflow into a saline drip used for cardiac testing (cath??) patients.
Just guessing, but the saline was probably a flushing fluid.
I’m not defending the nurse, just saying that the hysteria and outrage is probably very misplaced.
Thanks for feedback.
Back in mid 1980’s we were all pretty afraid of this virus. A colleague of mine, a lab tech, got infected before universal precautions were universal.
But back then I was as hysterical about it as anyone could be, however, dealing with a wide scope of occupational health issues is now part of my job, so I try to keep current on the issues.
Recycling. Imagine how much landfill space all those bags and tubing would take up.
What is earholing?
The risk is more from lawyers finding procedural failings than for disease transmission.
Litigation has made the US so risk adverse that we are an over engineered, disposable society quickly developing the immune system no stronger than production farm poultry.
If we can’t engineer triple redundancy or have 350% rated capacity then some lawyer can convince a jury that a system isn’t safe enough.
Did you know that in some parts of the world they sell non prescription non narcotic pain killers that actually work? And they have mosquito repellent and bug sprays that really truly work as expected?
But neither is FDA approved, and the manufacturers and retailers actually expect the end users to follow directions and use it properly. Or suffer the consequences!
I don't see any panic on this thread, just indignation. Are you saying you wouldn't be angry if a nurse needlessly put one of your family members at risk this way? It's stupid behavior and I see no reason why you should be defending it.
You're right. She didn't refill the bags. Each patient has a new sterile needle inserted into a vein with a short length of tubing with a connector on the end of it. That connector is attached to a connector that comes from the bag. The problem is blood often backs up into the tubing connected to the patient and that could contact the connector from the bag and infect another patient.
the line could have been connected directly to the catheter.........with even more potential for infection. when we hook up lines we do not use a lock, we hook it up directly to the catheter.
http://www.npr.org/templates/text/s.php?sId=9002473&m=1
Quote: “Football players have a name for a violent — yet often legal — hit on a player who doesn’t see it coming. The word is “earholed,” referring to the earhole on the side of the helmet where the unwitting player gets blasted.”
Beats being “cornholed”.
I’m wondering if the nurse was from another country where this practice is common. BUT if so, the orientation process wasn’t adequate.
see my post directly after yours.......the article I found has her name and more info. she is a seven year employee.
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