In this podcast, I talk with Chuck Biddle, PhD, CRNA about iatrogenic infections related to anesthesia workstation behaviors.  This continues to be a focal point of Dr Biddle’s research on patient safety and is a topic that concerns every anesthesia provider everywhere.  Anesthesia providers have the potential to harm patients via the spread of infectious organisms as part of routine patient care.  Dr Biddle discusses challenges and possible solutions for reducing patient harm related to anesthesia provider practices and the anesthesia workstation.  This topic and related research has the potential to change practice and advance the care that anesthesia practitioners provide worldwide.

Dr Biddle is a professor of Nurse Anesthesia at Virginia Commonwealth University (VCU) and provides anesthesia services as a CRNA at VCU Medical Center.  He oversees the research efforts of the Department of Nurse Anesthesia at VCU and has served continuously as the Editor-in-Chief of the AANA Journal for over 25 years.  Dr Biddle’s anesthesia education and Master’s degree were earned at Old Dominion University and his PhD in epidemiology is from the University of Missouri.

Highlights:

“I think the most important thing that the listener can do, that we can do as practitioners, is to talk about it… because there are people out there far smarter than I with greater perspective – novel perspective – that will come up with solutions for this problem that we’re facing.” Chuck Biddle, PhD, CRNA

“There will be a new generation of anesthesia providers and thinkers and engineers and nurses and doctors etcetera that will find solutions to these problems.”  Chuck Biddle, PhD, CRNA

Resources:

Biddle, C., & Shah, J. (2012). Quantification of anesthesia providers’ hand hygiene in a busy metropolitan operating room: What would Semmelweis think? American Journal of Infection Control, 40, 756-759. doi:10.1016/j.ajic.2011.10.008

Biddle, C. (2009). Semmelweis Revisited: Hand Hygiene and Nosocomial Disease Transmission in the Anesthesia Workstation. AANA Journal, 77(3), 229-237.

Munoz-Price, L. S., & Weinstein, R. A. (2015). Fecal patina in the anesthesia work area. Anesthesia And Analgesia, 120(4), 703-705. doi:10.1213/ANE.0000000000000542