Elective surgeries cancelled at Victoria and University hospitals after problem with surgical trays | CBC News
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Elective surgeries and some other procedures have been cancelled at the region’s largest hospital network after problems were found with surgical trays.
The issue with the trays was discovered Monday, Tammy Quigley, one of the London Health Sciences Centre’s executives, told CBC’s London Morning.
About 150 surgeries scheduled for Tuesday and Wednesday were cancelled “out of an abundance of caution,” Quigley said.
“Cancelling surgery is a very significant decision for us. We know that our patients have waited long times for surgeries and have made plans to have their surgeries, so to receive a call to cancel is disappointing.”
Hip and knee replacements, ear tubes for children, and some spine surgeries are among those cancelled.
Surgical trays sit on a wrapper, with the instruments on top, before getting put into the sterilization machine, Quigley said.
“When it comes out, we open them up and always do a visual inspection. During those inspections we were finding that some of the trays, not all of them, had some staining on the inside. Out of an abundance of caution we needed to stop and pause and understand what it could potentially be.”
Experts from the infectious disease team, the surgical team, and the medical device reprocessing team, which decontaminates and sterilizes equipment, have been brought in to figure out what could be causing the stains, Quigley said.
The stains were first found Monday evening at University Hospital.
“There’s a chemical test and a biological test with every single run, and we ask every single time if we met the standards in terms of the stem penetrating those instruments. Our infectious disease specialists have looked at that and determined that the risk is quite low that there was a biological contaminant.”
Teams will meet again on Wednesday to determine if surgeries can be resumed, Quigley said.
The medical device reprocessing team, which decontaminates and sterilizes equipment, is made up of 120 hospital employees. The sterilization is done at all three sites of the LHSC, including Victoria and University hospitals and the Nazem Kadri Surgical Centre.
They process more than 25,000 medical devices every day.
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