Ethical questions arise in all areas of our Hospital. Our faces of ethics feature highlights different roles/departments in our organization and how ethics is relevant to their work.

What does your department do?

Our department cleans, sterilizes, packages, and disperses tools needed for surgeries and other procedures. We ensure that medical devices are sterile and prepared for procedures in Operating Rooms and throughout the Hospital.

What kind of ethical questions are you faced within your line of work?

Many ethical questions are considered within our department. Due to the nature of medical procedures and the requirement to be prepared for anything, medical device kits are highly stocked with supplies. We need medical professionals to have access to the tools that they may need in a procedure. Because of this, however, up to eighty percent of all tools that are sent up to the OR may never actually be used. These still need to be reprocessed. So in this way, we need to balance physician needs and ensure quick access to tools, with the environmental waste associated with tools that are not used/required for certain procedures. During the COVID-19 pandemic, there have been ethical questions related to access to PPE and the safety of re-purposing items that were not readily available at all times due to global shortages (such as N95 masks, for example). Additional ethical questions that arise for us include the utility/ease of single-use items versus repurposed items, and what to do when certain tools or implements are needed for patients, when we don’t have immediate access to them.

Ethics affects us all. Anyone struggling with an ethics question can contact the Bioethicist for support or access decision-making resources on the intranet.

Bioethicist: Michelle Allain – allainm@tbh.net, Ext. 6538