Operating theatre exsanguinators pose a low risk for transmission of infection
Bibliographic record
Abstract
There is increasing concern regarding transmission of infection in hospitals. The cost of a hospital-acquired infections can run into several thousands of pounds per patient [1]. We regularly use Esmarch bandages and black rubber Rhys exsanguinators, which are applied prior to tourniquet inflation for orthopaedic and plastic surgery procedures. An open wound is wrapped in plastic bags prior to placement of the exsanguinator. It became apparent that as these exsanguinators were used on repeated patients and cleaned between by washing with a Hibiscrub solution, they may be a source of infection. We decided to send swabs from all seven of our exsanguinators to microbiology for routine culture. All four Esmarch bandages showed no bacterial growth. One out of our three Rhys exsanguinators grew a coagulase-negative staphylococcus. This is a non-pathogenic skin commensal. Obviously, our numbers are small, but the low incidence of positive culture was reassuring. However, the growth from the black rubber exsanguinator may be due to the fact that it is more difficult to clean adequately, and shows that there is no room for complacency in the cleaning of such pieces of equipment.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".