INDIANAPOLIS — Surgeries at the Roudebush VA Medical Center in Indianapolis are starting to return to normal after sterilization problems forced the hospital to delay or cancel hundreds of veterans’ operations.
The problems, first reported by 13News in May, involve surgical instruments that were supposed to be used during medical procedures.
Hospital administrators told 13 Investigates that VA staff “identified abnormalities in sterilized instruments” that had small white and brown spots on them.
“We started to see several of these in a single day, and so at that point in time, we stopped immediately processing instruments here,” Chief Nursing Executive Christie Artuso told 13News in May.
The VA hospital established a large Incident Management Team, which took drastic action.
It canceled or delayed surgeries for hundreds of veterans and sent hundreds of others to different area hospitals for their operations. At the same time, the VA shut down the hospital’s sterile processing service department while it investigated the cause of the sterilization problems.
Instead of sterilizing medical equipment on site, Roudebush executives were forced to send surgical instruments to VA hospitals in Marion, Fort Wayne, Dayton and Cincinnati to make sure they were properly sterilized.
Transporting the instruments to other facilities – a process that involved hundreds of miles of roundtrip travel – caused delays to scheduled surgeries and a significant disruption to hospital operations, according to staff who spoke with 13News.
As of late July, the VA confirms operations at its Indianapolis medical center are improving.
A VA spokesman told 13News that the hospital has found a way to reduce the pH level of steam used to sterilize its surgical instruments, eliminating the brown and white spots that had caused concern. In addition, the VA has installed new sterilization machines, new filters and new plumbing to help prevent the problem from reoccurring.
“The filters are working like a dream,” said hospital public affairs chief Mark Turney, adding that veterans who need surgery are no longer being referred to other hospitals due to a lack of available surgical instruments.
But the VA told 13 Investigates at least 468 veterans who needed surgeries were impacted by the problem. As of July 19, the VA said 90 of those patients were still waiting to have their rescheduled operations at Roudebush.
The VA expects those delayed surgeries to be completed by the end of August, and a hospital spokesman told 13News, “there have been no negative patient outcomes as a result of this situation.”