Reuse of single-use medical devices in Canadian acute-care healthcare facilities, 2001.

AORN guidance statement: Reuse of single-use devices.

Today's economic environment has compelled health care organizations to explore methods to reduce health care costs. One prospective approach to controlling rising costs is to reprocess single-use medical devices. Reprocessing is rigorously regulated by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA). AORN, the Association of periOpera-tive Registered Nurses, recognizes the need for each health care ...

The ethics of reusing single-use devices.

The topic of reprocessing medical devices labelled as single-use items is something of an ethical quagmire. The only thing clear about this issue, it seems, is that it is complicated and encompasses many areas, including patient safety, fiscal responsibility and environmental stewardship. “The reuse of SUIs [single-use items] is an extraordinarily complex issue,” Alice Moszczynski, a registered...

Safety-cost trade-offs in medical device reuse: a Markov decision process model.

Healthcare expenditures in the US are approaching 2 trillion dollars, and hospitals and other healthcare providers are under tremendous pressure to rein in costs. One cost-saving approach which is gaining popularity is the reuse of medical devices which were designed only for a single use. Device makers decry this practice as unsanitary and unsafe, but a growing number of third-party firms are ...

Reprocessing single-use devices: an international perspective.

1244 CMAJ, August 9, 2011, 183(11) © 2011 Canadian Medical Association or its licensors Do you dispose of the plastic baggie or save it for tomorrow’s ham sandwich? Do you throw away the plastic fork or wash it and stick it in the drawer with your stainless steel cutlery? With respect to cost and safety, these are minor decisions. Matters become more complicated when the disposable item is a $5...

Reuse of single-use critical medical devices.