Letters & Emails

Patient Warming, Surgeon Cooling
Re: "7 Ways to Warm Your Patients Without Inflaming Your Staff" (July, page 48). I found Ms. Chitwood's article informative. For 30 years, I've spent many long hours in the operating rooms treating gynecologic malignancies. In addition to addressing the importance of temperature control for the patient, the article makes the very important observation that the doctor under wraps for long hours needs his environment better supported as well.

A warming technique that's been very helpful to me is keeping the lap pads and the saline you use to irrigate the body cavity in a heated washbasin filled with warm saline. This helps decrease the heat loss from the "open body spaces" and helps to ensure my patients arrive in the recovery area stable and not battling the ravages of hypothermia.

Myron H. Lutz, MD
Roper/Bon Secours St. Francis Hospital
Charleston, S.C.
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CON Remarks Miss the Mark
Re: "Your Necessary Evils" (August, page 6). I do not often disagree with your Editor's Page perspective; however, your recent defense of the CON laws misses the mark.

What about the patient? Your mark should be on the patient. Charity care? ASCs take as high if not a higher percentage of Medicare/ Medicaid patients than hospitals. As for the uninsured, surely you are not suggesting that providing surgery at a lower cost in an ASC (Medicare alone saves about $500 billion a year because ASCs are available) is a bad result of competition.

Protecting hospitals? The evidence needs to move beyond the health of hospitals and look at the health of the patient in the community. Give me evidence of measures of overall health status for people. Frankly, hospitals need to re-engineer and reinvent themselves. Many have, and those successful examples usually include partnering successfully with physicians in ASCs.

Craig Jeffries
Executive Director
American Association of Ambulatory Surgery Centers
Johnson City, Tenn.
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Negotiating an Anesthesia Contract
Re: "Is Your Anesthesia Contract All It Should Be?" (August, page 43). This article was very informative and timely. We are on the cusp of negotiating a contract separate from our general partner for the first time, and this article gave me the information I needed in a concise and constructive format. Thanks for all the good work you do for all of us out here in the field.

Susan Roland, RN
Administrative Director
North Florida Surgical Pavilion
Gainesville, Fla.
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