2017 Surgical Instrument Reprocessing in Low Resource Settings
Team: Jovanny Guillen, Tatiana Jansen, Irene Kim
Client: Jared Forrester, MD, Resident in Surgery, General Surgery, & Joe Forrester, MD, Resident in Surgery, General Surgery, Palo Alto
Problem: Post-operative infections cause a tremendous burden of morbidity and mortality, especially in low-resource settings. Risk factors for developing an infection include patient comorbidities, pathogen characteristics, and what specifically occurs to the patient in the operating room and management post-operatively. Using sterile surgical instruments forms the backbone for provision of safe surgery as improperly cleaned instruments can be a vector for pathogens.
Outcome: Students devised a device to clean and sterilize medical tools using locally sourced materials to reduce surgical infections.