Ideas that Work: No Time to Waste

Marking trash bags with an OR's room number is a simple way to shorten the search for misplaced instruments. No matter how many instrument counts take place or how vigilant a surgical team might be, tools can get misplaced — or accidently thrown away. If we get a call from sterile processing about a missing instrument, the last thing anyone wants to do is search through multiple trash bags to look for it. To minimize the rummaging, we write OR room numbers on trash bags. That way, we'll only have to look through the bags from individual rooms when searching for an instrument that went missing during a specific case.

Carol Gentry, MSN, RN
Johns Hopkins Hospital
Baltimore
[email protected]