London hospital pauses elective surgeries citing ‘issue’ with surgical trays

Elective surgeries and some procedures at London Health Sciences Centre (LHSC) have been cancelled this week due to an issue with surgical trays.

In a statement released Tuesday afternoon, LHSC said the cancellations, which are set to remain in effect for all of Wednesday, came in response to staining seen on the hospital’s surgical trays that was identified by members of the organization’s medical device reprocessing team.

Tammy Quigley, system innovation and business development executive at LHSC, told Global News that the cancellations were made out of an abundance of caution.

“Certainly, a decision that someone at a hospital never wants to make is to cancel surgery,” she said. “We have, over the course of the last 24 hours, undertaken a significant investigation, including involvement of our infectious disease specialists, our surgeons and our specialists who work in our medical device reprocessing department that’s responsible for sterilizing the equipment.”

According to Quigley, “the risk is quite low from a patient safety perspective” in regards to the staining. However, the cause of the staining is still under investigation.

She explained that the surgical trays are required to go through proper sterilization after each use.

“It’s like a very fancy dishwasher which sterilizes all of our equipment with steam and chemicals,” she said. “When we load those trays into that washer, they sit on a sort of disposable liner, and then they’re all wrapped up and put in the machine.”

Quigley said that the machine has multiple indicators that are able to confirm whether or not the trays have passed both chemical and biological tests in terms of disposing of any leftover residue that may still be present.

“So, from a biological safety concern, which is what we’re always concerned about, when we open those trays and use those instruments inside, people are confident that this is unlikely to be a contaminant that would cause infection,” she said.

While the cause of the staining is still unknown, Quigley said that the hospital is exploring every avenue to “make sure that we understand where that is coming from.”

“Is it something in the water? Is it something related to the steam? Is it something that’s coming off a metal tray? So, we have undertaken that investigation,” she said.

Those impacted by the cancellations will be contacted by their care team. Those not contacted should come to their scheduled appointment, LHSC said in a statement.

“We deeply apologize to our patients and their care partners for this disruption – we know that having a surgery postponed or rescheduled can be stressful and challenging for many reasons,” the statement says.

Quigley said that the hospital “always has to take the precautionary principle and those steps are in place to keep patients safe.”

“We will be doing our very best once we’re ramping back up to get all of those patients taken care of as soon as we possibly can.”

Quigley said that more information is planned to be provided by Wednesday afternoon.

“I think we’re narrowing in on a root cause, but I will be receiving some further information this (Wednesday) morning and making a decision likely by midday today around whether we can resume surgeries or not,” she added.

– with files from Global News’ Andrew Graham.