Question:I am employed as an endoscopy nurse at a freestanding endoscopy/surgery facility. For our Fujinon endoscopes, we manually clean first and then the AER, followed by alcohol flush. We follow the current SGNA guideline regarding scope reprocessing.There is a group within our facility who use Olympus endoscopes, clean manually, then use the STERIS. Their feeling is that the STERIS "blows ...

QuestionI am an endoscopy manager at a hospital group in Massachusetts. I hope you can help me or send me in the right direction. Our hospital’s periop director has selected endoscopy to be part of a project with the same-day surgery unit. The endoscopy patients are recovered in the same-day surgery unit. The patients on average are staying in the ...

QuestionI am looking for current evidence-based practice information on the nurse-to-patient ratio for pre/post op in our digestive health center. Our facility has a nurse-to-patient ratio for the med/surg floor of 1:5. I do not feel this is a safe practice for recovering patients from conscious sedation. I have found information for Phase 1 recovery (1:1 and 1:2 for OB, and CCU at 1:2 and ...

QuestionI work in a small hospital in a rural setting. As you can imagine, we have staffing issues. Currently we use scrub techs, but we have a very bright young lady in our department cleaning rooms and scopes, who we think is trainable. Short of completing a scrub tech course is there any way we can train her to scrub? ...

The following is from the “Reader Questions” section of the editor’s letter page that ran in the October/November issue of EndoNurse. A submitted answer is below.  Q: Is it a policy to change your suction canister with every case or do you wait until it is full? -RN, CGRNA: I have been an endoscopy nurse for eighteen years, a nurse manager for ...