Brian W Skellie – Sharing ideas
When unused sterile instrument sets are returned from the OR or patient floors our policy is to re-sterilize the sets. Since these were unopened we inspect the wrap to be sure there are no holes, replace the tapes and labeling and re-sterilize the item.
An interesting observation on safety issues raised in returning contaminated items such as jewelry to clients, as voiced by this medical professional’s concerns for their patients. It is evident that infection control measures should be carefully considered when previously worn jewelry or other contaminated personal items are to be returned to a customer.
I am an OR nurse and recently started a new job in a prestigious orthopedic hospital. At the request of a surgeon or patient when implants are removed we have been cleaning and flashing them and returning them to the patient in a plastic bag.
[NOTE: Flashing is an outdated term for sterilizing items unwrapped for immediate use]
https://brnskll.com/shares/flash-faq/
A first glimpse at the new fourth generation of the fast STATIM 2000 autoclave
Among jewelry materials for initial piercing, glass deserves a closer look.
Ever wonder why we get different results when we search for the same thing? I don’t think it is a glass half empty/half full thing. It seems evident that the internet is serving as both the library and news journal for many of us, and that our machine personalized search results from Google, Yahoo, Bing and the rest are skewed in different ways. This has been apparent on Facebook as well, perhaps in a more obvious way when some of our friends’ disappeared from our news feeds.
Here is a glimpse of a few piercings I performed during an exhibition for colleagues in New England. I enjoy sharing ideas and techniques with my peers. Let me know what you think.
My goal is an atraumatic aseptic technique: Primum non nocere
All of these piercings were performed without clamps using the STATIM 2000 autoclave, sterilized single use equipment, sterile nitrile gloves, and the titanium jewelry was anodized with the Reactive Metals Micro anodizer.
If a product is not labeled for surgical preparation, it really doesn’t matter how good of a hand and body soap or cleanser it is. It would only be a really strong hand wash product, or possibly aftercare for our purposes.
Choose a product that has claims as a “surgical skin preparation” because “scrub” alone is only the first step as cleaning. A two step “scrub then paint” process is appropriate and advised by CDC. That involves a solvent or detergent scrub to clean followed by the surgical antiseptic to kill microbes to an irreducible minimum level of contamination.
I’m still looking for a universal surgical preparation agent, and have not found anything on the market that is both proven and FDA approved other than PVP-I, CHG based products and alcohol. I don’t want to recommend anything unless it is tested and labeled for the purpose. 
Other than making people shiny, my job is to help my fellow piercers and tattoo artists make their work easier, cleaner and safer
