Q: What are some of the reasons for retained sponge?

Several factors can lead to a surgical team leaving behind a sponge in a patient after finishing a case:

•  Abbreviated AORN recommended procedures
•  Lack of initial or final counts
•  Reliance on manufacturer’s pack content listings
•  Distractions during a count
•  Bypassed procedures
•  Rushing
•  Negligence

In fact, a January 2003 NEJM study of retained item cases reported that 88% of retained sponge cases reported a correct manual count at the end of a surgery.

Q: What are some hidden costs incurred by a medical institution with a retained sponge event?

•  Institutional embarrassment
•  Damage to reputation of surgeon and nursing staff
•  JCAHO accreditation may be jeopardized
•  Reimbursement qualifications may be reviewed by state and federal authorities
•  Personnel utilization issues
•  Insurance implications to both Institution / Surgeon
•  State licensing – reporting obligations
  

Q: What are benefits of using the System?

•  Reduction of lawsuit damages incurred per case
•  Maintain medical institutions reputation as a safe environment
•  Insurance premiums reductions
•  No need to lose surgical team members to assist in counting
•  Build trust between nursing and surgical staffs
•  Ability to schedule more surgeries through time-savings
  

Q: Will this slow down a surgical procedure?

No. Right now, a team at Harvard Medical School is working on quantifying the time savings from using the Safety-Sponge™ System. Unofficially, the system saves about 9-14 minutes per procedure. This happens two ways: the first method is obvious – because the system will no count the same sponge twice, the initial count will be correct and a time consuming recount will not occur unless a sponge truly is missing.

The second but more interesting reason is that the surgeon does not have to lose his or her scrub tech to assist in the verification of the count. Surgeons will be able to keep up the rhythm of their team as the procedure winds down. The circulating nurse will be able to start counting out earlier in a surgery because the system itself acts as the second person previously verifying the final count. Thus, counting out sponges can be safely started sooner, and the surgical team does not have to lose a member to assist in the count.

Q: Will this slow down the nursing staff?

No.  After a short period of acclimatization, nurses quickly adjust to the ease-of-use of the system.  Adjustable settings in the system let a user slow the response time of the system, but our field tests show that nursing staffs adjust quickly and tend use the fastest settings on the system.

Q: Will the Safety-Sponge™ System prevent a retained sponge?

Yes and no. Technically, the System cannot prevent a retained item – only the staff can remove a sponge from a body. But it is designed to give the nursing staff and surgeon the greatest confidence in the actual count itself, eliminating accidental false correct counts. Were a sponge to be left behind, the staff would be alerted to the fact that there was a sponge still unaccounted for in the system, and that they should proceed to start their search for the missing item.

Q: Why is the system a line-of-sight and not an RFID solution?

Radio Frequency Identification has been a buzzword these few past years. There are several reasons why RFID is the wrong technology to prevent retained sponges, both from an implementation approach and from a technological approach. Please see the “Why Not RFID” section for more information.

Q: Is the system patent protected?

SurgiCount currently has several patents and pending patents covering our technology.