SOME of the surgical tools introduced this year to help prevent transmission
of vCJD have caused surgeons serious problems, 91av has learned.
The tool, which is thrown away after a single use, is a pair of electrical
forceps for heat-sealing blood vessels after tonsillectomy. The NHS called for
disposable versions in January on the advice of Britain’s Spongiform
Encephalopathy Advisory Committee. Hospitals bought them from suppliers in a
number of countries. 91av has established that some were actually
reusable devices made in nations where cheap labour makes them inexpensive
enough to be disposable.
Surgeons who attempted to use them say that some of the forceps didn’t close
properly and had poor electrical contacts, making them unusable. Others had
oversized tips that burnt tissue surrounding blood vessels, making wounds more
likely to crack and haemorrhage later. “From a surgeon’s point of view, some of
them proved to be sub-standard,” says Alan Johnson, an ear, nose and throat
surgeon at the Queen Elizabeth Hospital in Birmingham. “I know some didn’t
live up to the NHS specifications.”
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“The supplies [of single-use forceps] were variable and certainly not very
good to start out with,” says Grant Bates, another ENT surgeon at the Radcliffe
Infirmary in Oxford. “They got better but it was still a bit iffy.” In October,
complaints led the government to warn hospitals to report any post-operative
problems. But following a patient’s death after a tonsillectomy, the NHS last
week suspended all but emergency use of the tools, pending an investigation.
While no one is pre-empting the results of that investigation, medical
sources speculate that the huge concern over potential vCJD transmission in
tonsillectomies could have resulted in the NHS rushing the instruments into
service too quickly.