YOU WOULDNT NEED A TAG TO KNOW THIS SPONGE WAS IN YOUR INTESTINE... (PHOTO: MAXB)
When I was 16 and at a career crossroads, I was considering a career in medicine so I did a week's work experience in a hospital. On my first day, I found myself in scrubs, a j-cloth hat, white clogs and a mask, holding a pile of pagers, standing in the corner of the operating room. Everyone was very nice and they encouraged me to ask questions. So I did. One of them was "Why do I keep hearing a beep and a sizzle and seeing a puff of smoke rise?" Answer - they were cauterising blood vessels. Urgh. Why did I ask. The next one was "Why is there a nurse standing there counting the bits of gauze and needles and stuff?" Answer - so they don't leave anything inside the patient. This is obviously completely second nature to all medical staff, but it hadn't occured to me.
On reading about it, I found that there were lots of clever ways to avoid leaving anything behind (ew). Such as gauze that shows up on x-rays. And now sponges that beep. Equipping sponges with Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) Tags meant that they could be detected through the abdomen of the test patients. This is a good effort because apparently surgeons leave things behind once in every 10,000 operations. This is a pretty good record, but with millions of operations going on each year, it's a risky business. But those tags are usually used to find lost luggage and track counterfeited money, so I'm not absolutely certain the beeping sponges are really much better than the counting nurse in the long run...
Via ABC Australia.
The RFIDs work well, as long as you don't undergo elective surgery in Heathrow.
Posted by: Kevin P | July 24, 2006 at 06:47 PM
who cares
Posted by: pete | October 17, 2007 at 05:00 AM