Roudebush VA Medical Center Halts Surgeries Due to Sterilization Issues

The Roudebush VA Medical Center in Indianapolis has put surgeries on hold and mobilized a special incident response team due to surgical instruments not looking “as clean as they should.” WTHR has the news.

Roudebush VAMC chief nursing executive Christie Artuso said that there were “water spots that seemed to have a little bit of a white ring around them and then they also noticed a few brown spots.” The VA insists that “there have been no negative patient outcomes as a result of this situation.” Operations were suspended at the hospital’s Sterile Processing Service (SPS) once the problem was discovered on April 10.

The incident management team turned to other VA hospitals for help in sterilizing instruments needed for surgeries. Some of its scheduled operations are carrying on with help from four other hospitals, but the “time-consuming” nature of transporting the sterilized products from one hospital to another safely has “impacted the number of surgeries performed” at the hospital. The hospital saw a 43% decrease in operations as a result.

The holdup has forced many patients to “reschedule their surgeries multiple times over the past six weeks.” At this point, Roudebush executives still are unsure what caused the sterilization process to “go awry.” One possibility is that “highly-acidic water in Roudebush’s steam injection system produced the white and brown spots detected on surgical instruments. She told 13News that engineers have installed a new steam injection system, as well as new filters, valves and pipes in an attempt to remedy the problem.”

Roudebush executives are “optimistic that the SPS will be fully operational by early June, but at this point, no one at the VA Medical Center is willing to set a firm date for facility operations and patient surgeries to return to normal.”