Surgical fire safety requires constant vigilance and the knowledge of the proactive and preventative steps that the perioperative care team must take to ensure patient safety. Furthermore, part of every hospital fire safety checklist should also ensure that everyone knows their responsibilities in the case of a Code Red.
Going through the Do’s and Don’ts of surgical fire safety is an essential part of every surgical safety education. For example, have you ensured that there is a holster available for the electrosurgical pencil? Are you keeping oxygen from pooling under the drapes? These are a few of the checks that you need to make to mitigate fire risk.
On a more general level, do you know the evacuation plan and routes? Do you know what your responsibilities are in case of a fire, and the locations and types of the fire extinguishers?
This can be a lot to remember, so it is very helpful to have frequent visual reminders. Jackson Medical has made this poster available so that it can provide this visual reminder to do the most critical fire safety checklist items. There is even a space where the location and type of available fire extinguishers can be filled in with a marker to customize based on which OR the sign is hanging.
This poster is part of Jackson Medical’s Fire Safety Toolkit, which is available for free here on our website. It includes informational posters that can be displayed or provided to staff for education specifically highlighting top fire hazards present in the ORs. Physically checking off the items on the checklists in this tool kit is a big step that OR care teams can take to improve surgical fire safety.
This toolkit was built on guidelines, recommendations, and requirements from organizations such as AORN, the Joint Commission, NFPA, and the FDA, as well as evidence-based literature. Mitigating fire risk with preventive solutions like GloShield aligns with several of these guidelines. GloShield insulates the surrounding environment from the tips of fiber-optic light cables, which can reach temperatures of up to 500℉ and serve as an ignition source. In this way, GloShield effectively separates the “ignition source” side of the fire triangle from the others, thus preventing a fire from starting. Contact Jackson Medical and the GloShield team for additional details and support.