Disposable medical consumables must not have regulatory blind spots

Medical disposable consumables cannot be reused, otherwise they are very likely to cause cross-infection or secondary infection, and even lead to unpredictable serious consequences. However, driven by profit, some people take risks and reuse disposable medical consumables regardless of patients' health. Recently, the Shenzhen Intermediate People's Court conducted a second-instance judgment on a case involving the reuse of disposable surgical consumables. Two doctors were sentenced to two years and ten months and one year and eight months in prison respectively for the crime of selling medical devices that do not meet standards.

If disposable high-value medical consumables are reused, violators can gain huge illegal profits. For example, in this case, the price of a single disposable cryoablation needle is more than 9,000 yuan. Reusing it once means charging more than 9,000 yuan extra. The two doctors involved used fewer than 50 needles but performed surgeries on 212 patients, charging fees for 603 needles totaling nearly 6 million yuan. Such a small ablation needle generated such huge illegal profits; it truly is like a tiny hole that can let through a strong wind.

Besides seeking profit, convenience is also an important reason for breaching the "disposable" bottom line of consumables. In 2017, medical staff at a hospital in Zhejiang repeatedly used disposable suction tubes during operations, causing cross-contamination and leading to some patients being infected with HIV. This major medical accident once triggered widespread social concern about the reuse of disposable consumables.

Once consumables change from "single-use" to "multiple-use," supervision becomes very difficult. Surgeries are conducted behind closed doors; not only external supervisors but even medical staff unrelated to the surgery cannot approach the operating table freely. Under this circumstance, a small action by a doctor can complete a "swap," replacing new consumables with used ones. The illegal profits are huge, and supervision has blind spots. The combination of these two factors is enough to make some people take risks.

In fact, effective supervisory methods do exist, but they still need to be institutionalized and standardized. For example, although operating rooms are "off-limits to unauthorized personnel," each surgery is accompanied by a scrub nurse whose important duties include counting every instrument and consumable placed on the operating table before and after surgery. The main purposes are to avoid leaving surgical materials inside the patient and to check whether instruments and consumables meet requirements. If, on this basis, the scrub nurse's responsibility to supervise disposable medical consumables is further clarified, supervision can extend directly to the operating table, making it much harder for surgeons to tamper with materials.

A more effective method is to assign each medical consumable a unique electronic supervision code to track its flow, and based on the resulting big data, establish an information-based traceability system for consumables, then integrate it uniformly into the supervision scope of medical insurance departments. If this is done, not only will the repeated use of disposable consumables be easily exposed, but fraudulent invoicing and other behaviors will also have no room to operate.

Repeatedly using disposable consumables not only causes patients to pay for "used goods" but also makes medical insurance funds pay repeatedly, which is a double harm to patients and insurance funds. Improving hospital management, issuing targeted regulations, significantly reducing the prices of high-value consumables, greatly reducing profits from reuse, including disposable consumables in the key supervision list of medical insurance, and using information technology to detect hidden tricks are all measures that help reduce supervision difficulties, eliminate blind spots, and further safeguard the safety of both medical care and medical insurance.