Ética en instrumentación quirúrgica / Ethics in surgical instrumentation

Es imprescindible en la práctica de la cirugía no sólo estudiar técnicas e instrumental en profundidad, sino también lo referido a las virtudes y valores morales del grupo humano quirúrgico para proveer una conducta ética intachable en el quirófano. La calidad de asistencia se valora a través del resultado de los servicios propuestos y obtenidos, sin dejar de lado aspectos ético-morales del instrumentador quirúrgico, cuya función principal es no dañar al paciente no sólo desde el punto de vista técnico, sino también desde el moral. Durante la presencia del enfermo en el quirófano siempre se exigen respuestas éticas al coordinar y proporcionar los cuidados para cubrir las necesidades detectadas, ya sean fisiológicas, psicológicas (el miedo, la ansiedad ante la cirugía) e incluso espirituales, pero con respeto a sus creencias y valores morales. El instrumentador, como parte esencial del grupo quirúrgico, debe refinar esos valores personales (por ejemplo, no participar en una cirugía urgente de un delincuente si existe un conflicto de interés), identificar sin sesgos o prejuicios el conocimiento de las leyes y códigos de conducta (evitar el abandono de una persona necesitada) y comprender los valores, creencias y principios éticos de los demás para así tomar una decisión racional ante un dilema principalmente ético. El equipo quirúrgico ostentará tanto los valores científico-técnicos como los personales sin entrar en conflicto con las creencias del paciente, porque, al tomar decisiones moral y éticamente válidas, actuará como protector de los derechos del enfermo en una cirugía.(AU)

In the practice of surgery it is essential not only to study techniques and instruments in depth, but also that referred to the virtues and moral values of the surgical team to provide an impeccable ethical conduct in the operating room. The quality of care is assessed through the result of the services proposed and obtained, without neglecting ethical-moral aspects of the surgical instrumentator whose main function is not to harm the patient not only from the technical point of view but morally. During the presence of the patient in the operating room, ethical responses are always required when coordinating and providing care to cover the needs detected, whether physiological, psychological (fear, anxiety before surgery) or spiritual, but with respect for their beliefs and moral values. The assistant or auxiliary surgical, as an essential part of the surgical team, must refine these personal values (for example, not participate in an urgent surgery of an offender if there is a conflict of interest), identify without bias or prejudice the knowledge of the laws and codes of conduct (avoid abandonment of a person in need) and understand the values, beliefs and ethical principles of others in order to make a rational decision in the face of a mainly ethical dilemma. The surgical team will hold both scientific-technical and personal values with beliefs without conflicting with those of the patient, because when making morally and ethically valid decisions, act as a protector of the rights of the patient in a surgery.(AU)

Sales Representatives in the Operating Room: Conflict of Interest or Clinical Support?

BACKGROUND: The Physician Payment Sunshine Act, which became federal law in January 2012, mandated that medical device manufacturers must disclose any financial support provided to individual physicians on a publicly available Web site. The law reflects increasing concern about physician-industry relationships. METHODS: The connection between surgeon and sales representative creates possibilities for both financial and non-financial conflicts of interest (COIs). Indeed, COIs may be inherent when a sales representative is motivated by profit while also serving a critical role in many surgeries. RESULTS: The potential benefits and risks for patients, who may not even be aware of the sales representative's presence in the operating room, must be considered. CONCLUSIONS: This paper adds to the national discussion about neurosurgical physician-industry conflicts of interests and the issues relative to sales representatives in the operating room.

Burn wound care of civilians in Sahel region by French military surgical teams: ethical challenges and future training requirements.

The primary mission of the French military surgical teams deployed in external operations in the Sahel is to provide support for combatants. However, many of their activities and of the limited human and material resources allocated to them are devoted to providing free medical assistance to the local population. The French military surgical teams are very often expected to take care of serious burns for the benefit of civil populations because of the absence of dedicated civilian medical structures. Surgical teams are faced with a necessary triage of patients to be taken care of because of the discrepancy between the high demand for care and the means at their disposal. But the triage can lead to ethical dilemmas when the values that come into play in the decision contradict each other or when they run up against the quota of available human and material resources, as well as the interests of the military institution. The challenge is then to become aware of these dilemmas in this particular context. A discussion of these ethical dilemmas would help carers to avoid developing fatalistic attitudes or developing chronic pathologies due to unresolved or unconscious predicaments. Solutions are proposed that place ethical reflection at the heart of the practices during external operations by the French surgical teams. The ethics of discussion must bring together all players in care management and also the military authorities, before, during and after the missions. Training programmes for ethical reflection would benefit surgical teams and help them approach and become aware of the dilemmas they will necessarily face.

Perioperative nurses' experiences of caring for donation after cardiac death organ donors and their family within the operating room.

Background: Worldwide, operating rooms have seen the re-emergence of donation after cardiac death organ donors to increase the number of available organs. There is limited information on the issues perioperative nurses encounter when caring for donor patients after cardiac death who proceed to organ procurement surgery. Objectives: The purpose of this paper is to report a subset of findings derived from a larger study highlighting the difficulties experienced by perioperative nurses when encountering donation after cardiac death organ donors and their family within the operating room during organ procurement surgery from an Australian perspective. Methods: A qualitative grounded theory method was used to explore perioperative nurses' (n = 35) experiences of participating in multi-organ procurement surgery. Results: This paper reports a subset of findings of the perioperative nurses' experiences directly related to donation after cardiac death procedures drawn from a larger grounded theory study. Participants revealed four aspects conceptualised as: 'witnessing the death of the donation after cardiac death donor'; 'exposure to family'; 'witnessing family grief' and 'stepping into the family's role by default'. Conclusion: Perioperative nurses' experiences with donation after cardiac death procedures are complex, challenging and demanding. Targeted support, education and training will enhance the perioperative nurses' capabilities and experiences of caring for the donation after cardiac death donor and their family with the operating room context.

Robotic Systems in Operating Theaters: New Forms of Team-Machine Interaction in Health Care.

BACKGROUND: Health information systems have developed rapidly and considerably during the last decades, taking advantage of many new technologies. Robots used in operating theaters represent an exceptional example of this trend. Yet, the more these systems are designed to act autonomously and intelligently, the more complex and ethical questions arise about serious implications of how future hybrid clinical team-machine interactions ought to be envisioned, in situations where actions and their decision-making are continuously shared between humans and machines. OBJECTIVES: To discuss the many different viewpoints-from surgery, robotics, medical informatics, law, and ethics-that the challenges of novel team-machine interactions raise, together with potential consequences for health information systems, in particular on how to adequately consider what hybrid actions can be specified, and in which sense these do imply a sharing of autonomous decisions between (teams of) humans and machines, with robotic systems in operating theaters as an example. RESULTS: Team-machine interaction and hybrid action of humans and intelligent machines, as is now becoming feasible, will lead to fundamental changes in a wide range of applications, not only in the context of robotic systems in surgical operating theaters. Collaboration of surgical teams in operating theaters as well as the roles, competencies, and responsibilities of humans (health care professionals) and machines (robotic systems) need to be reconsidered. Hospital information systems will in future not only have humans as users, but also provide the ground for actions of intelligent machines. CONCLUSIONS: The expected significant changes in the relationship of humans and machines can only be appropriately analyzed and considered by inter- and multidisciplinary collaboration. Fundamentally new approaches are needed to construct the reasonable concepts surrounding hybrid action that will take into account the ascription of responsibility to the radically different types of human versus nonhuman intelligent agents involved.

The Survey Checklist (Manifesto).

Checklists can mitigate a multitude of high-cost mistakes in fields ranging from surgery to aviation. As part of a standard protocol, checklists may provide many benefits, including improved equity and communication among team members and more efficient integration of different processes during complex tasks. Mostly, though, checklists serve as easy, efficient means to remind professionals of what they already know but can easily forget. By improving processes, checklists can reduce procedural errors, miscommunications, and even deaths. Although the stakes of writing a survey are rarely as high as they are for performing surgery or piloting a plane, checklists can improve the quality of surveys in medical education. In this Perspective, the authors propose a survey checklist to serve the same core function as surgical checklists-to reduce error. That is, a survey checklist can help medical education practitioners and researchers gather more accurate responses. Designers can use the checklist in the appendix to guide item creation processes or to help evaluate the quality of existing surveys. The checklist focuses on formulating items, crafting response options, and formatting/organizing the whole survey.

Surgery in Shackles: What Are Surgeons' Obligations to Incarcerated Patients in the Operating Room?

Incarcerated patients frequently require surgery outside of the correctional setting, where they can be shackled to the operating table in the presence of armed corrections officers who observe them throughout the procedure. In this circumstance, privacy protection-central to the patient-physician relationship-and the need to control the incarcerated patient for the safety of health care workers, corrections officers, and society must be balanced. Surgeons recognize the heightened need for gaining a patient's trust within the context of an operation. For an anesthetized patient, undergoing an operation while shackled and observed by persons in positions of power is a violation of patient privacy that can lead to increased feelings of vulnerability, mistrust of health care professionals, and reduced therapeutic potential of a procedure.

Promoting Civility in the OR: An Ethical Imperative.

Recognizing, addressing, and preventing incivility in the health care environment, including the perioperative area, requires an intentional and informed approach to foster healthy workplaces and protect patient safety. Several important foundational documents and position statements speak directly to the nurse's responsibility to protect patient, coworker, and personal safety and promote civility and respect. In the complex, fast-paced environment of the OR, the pressure to meet patient needs, performance outcomes, and patient safety standards can lead to conflict and incivility. In this article, we present a case-based scenario to illustrate a multilevel evidence-based response to an uncivil encounter that could negatively affect patient safety in the OR. After the scenario, we discuss the responses to the encounter from the organization, the nurse manager, and the individual nurse. When nurses speak up and resolve issues, they report better patient outcomes, greater satisfaction in the workplace, and heightened organizational commitment.

Legal, ethical and professional concepts within the operating department.

There are a number of desirable healthcare practices, such as the requirement for consent and confidentiality, and a respect for the patient, that are ethically sound and legally required (Staunton & Chiarella 2008). The purpose of the law is to provide a deterrent to malpractice, and compensation when things go wrong. All health professionals should be actively aware of the law and its various key concepts. These are primarily negligence, consent, accountability, confidentiality and advocacy (Watson & Tilley 2004). This article is designed to identify the concepts that are important within the operating department. Legal, ethical and professional perspectives that underpin these concepts will be discussed along with relevant case law, ethical theory and the Health Professions Council's (HPC) code of conduct.

To sleep or not to sleep, that is the question.

The chief of surgery finds a recently boarded vascular surgeon, Dr B.R. Ash, on the couch in the doctor's lounge where a resident is trying to awaken him for permission to start the elective schedule. Dr Ash had finished an arduous all-nighter emergency case less than an hour ago and mumbles for the resident to proceed. The chief surgeon knows that the case about to be started is a type IV thoracoabdominal aneurysm repair to be followed by a carotid endarterectomy.

The use of distributed displays of operating room video when real-time occupancy status was available.

INTRODUCTION: On the day of surgery, real-time information of both room occupancy and activities within the operating room (OR) is needed for management of staff, equipment, and unexpected events. METHODS: A status display system showed color OR video with controllable image quality and showed times that patients entered and exited each OR (obtained automatically). The system was installed and its use was studied in a 6-OR trauma suite and at four locations in a 19-OR tertiary suite. Trauma staff were surveyed for their perceptions of the system. RESULTS: Evidence of staff acceptance of distributed OR video included its operational use for >3 yr in the two suites, with no administrative complaints. Individuals of all job categories used the video. Anesthesiologists were the most frequent users for more than half of the days (95% confidence interval [CI] >50%) in the tertiary ORs. The OR charge nurses accessed the video mostly early in the day when the OR occupancy was high. In comparison (P < 0.001), anesthesiologists accessed it mostly at the end of the workday when occupancy was declining and few cases were starting. Of all 30-min periods during which the video was accessed in the trauma suite, many accesses (95% CI >42%) occurred in periods with no cases starting or ending (i.e., the video was used during the middle of cases). The three stated reasons for using video that had median surveyed responses of "very useful" were "to see if cases are finished," "to see if a room is ready," and "to see when cases are about to finish." CONCLUSIONS: Our nurses and physicians both accepted and used distributed OR video as it provided useful information, regardless of whether real-time display of milestones was available (e.g., through anesthesia information system data).

La cirugía de recuperación prolongada no hace más vulnerable ni frena la cirugía mayor ambulatoria / No disponible

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