For more than a decade, doctors at Detroit Medical Center lodged complaints about surgical instruments. Some were dirty or broken, they said. Others were missing altogether. Now both the CMS and the state of Michigan are investigating the claims, which were aired in a newspaper account late last month.
No matter what investigators find at DMC, unclean surgical instruments and other medical devices are nothing new. The reasons include the difficulty of cleaning some tools, the training and labor conditions of employees tasked with cleaning them and a lack of data and transparency that obscures links between infections and dirty medical instruments.
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