Here's a quiz for you medical
practitioners out there. Reusing syringes is: A) an effective cost-cutting
measure, or B) an excellent way to get sued into oblivion for malpractice
and gross negligence? If you picked B, congratulations! You can hold on to your medical licenses.
If you picked A, then I've got some bad news for you. And you've probably got some
bad news for your patients. The Nevada state legislature
is passing bills left and right to make sure that the practice of syringe re-use is tossed out with the next biohazard trash.
A tragedy involving sloppy (basic!) medical practices in early 2008 has been causing ripples ever since.
In February 2008, the Southern
Nevada Health District announced that unsafe anesthetic practices involving
reused syringes had led to the contraction of hepatitis C by six patients,
prompting them to send letters to over 40,000 people who had been treated
by the Endoscopy Center of Southern Nevada, urging them to be tested
for hepatitis B and C as well as HIV. According to Joseph Perz of the
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, it was "the largest patient
notification of its kind."
Since then, three more cases
were confirmed to have originated at the endoscopy center and over 100
cases yet to be resolved were potentially associated with it, prompting
outrage, hysteria and a slew of new legislation designed to curb the
shockingly prevalent neglect of simple procedures like sterilizing equipment
and discarding used syringes --- procedures that, according to a senior
staff member at the University of Nevada School of Medicine, are "repeated
and ingrained" into the heads of first-year med students.
The most notable bill arising
from this mess, Assembly Bill 123, requires clinics or other health
facilities that perform outpatient surgical procedures to be subject
to yearly inspections that are performed unannounced, as opposed to
announced inspections every three to six years. This move was likely
motivated by the quite literally sickening findings of surprise inspections
carried out at over 50 Nevada facilities the week following the endoscopy
center scandal. After a full week of press coverage and public outcry,
two more facilities in Las Vegas and Reno were caught reusing syringes.
According to the head of the
Nevada State Medical Association, Larry Matheis, "This [bill] can
assist in immediate corrections." He even showed high hopes for the
bill's application, saying, "this may become a new national model."
One of the 5 other bills stemming
from this is Assembly Bill 10, which provides key whistleblowing safeguards
for nurses and other medical personnel who either blow the whistles
themselves or cooperate with investigations prompted by said whistleblowers.
Another bill, Assembly Bill 495, removes the $350,000 limit on "pain
and suffering" damages that can be collected in lawsuits involving
"gross negligence" of the kind that occurred at the endoscopy center.
The Nevada executive branch
is getting in on the action as well in setting national precedent. The
state's Department of Health and Human Services has already joined forces
with a national medical accrediting agency and is linking up with 10
other accrediting organizations nationwide in order to help control
similar outbreaks. Assembly Bill 123 mandates that all ambulatory surgery
facilities must be nationally accredited, so the Nevada DHHS will have
almost instant access to the accreditation agencies' reports as well
as the power to act on their findings
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