Procedures are put in place for sanitizing equipment to be used in surgeries to avoid contamination and exposure to various viruses. Each step of the procedure, no matter how small, is important to ensure the safety of patients and doctors.
At the Goshen Hospital in Indiana, however, a technician missed a step in this process, thereby potentially exposing more than 1,000 surgical patients to HIV as well as hepatitis C and hepatitis B, reported CNN.
Liz Fisher, the marketing specialist for Goshen Health, said in a press release that as many as 1,182 patients who had surgery between April and September of 2019 may have been affected. While this seems frightening, the hospital made sure to emphasize that the risk of exposure is “extremely low.” Just to be safe, the hospital is providing potentially impacted patients with free testing for the potential viruses.
“While our sterile processing and infectious disease experts believe that the potential transmission of blood borne viruses between patients is extremely remote, out of an abundance of caution, we want to verify through lab blood tests that patients have not been harmed,” the hospital’s president and chief medical officer said in an update last Wednesday. – READ MORE