How to Create the Best Custom Surgical Tray for Your Practice
Considerations
A surgeon’s tray is one of his or her most important tools in operation. Several questions should be asked before you decide on even the proper family of trays you’ll need. This is why custom trays are so popular today. Before customizing yours, ask yourself:
- What kind of operations is this tray for?
- What kind of tools are required?
- Does the tray need to be suspended?
- What kind of budget are you working with?
- What sterilization measures are necessary/available?
- Utility–how comfortable/awkward is the tray? It can’t delay necessary action.
Tray Characteristics
Generally, surgeons are looking for trays that are:
- Easy to Sterilize: Sometimes surgery must happen extremely fast, and a tray that’s hard to sterilize can lose a life. Ideally, sterilization procedure should be very fast, and very straightforward. Custom trays are more likely to be designed this way than some non-custom options.
- Sturdy: Custom trays should be strong enough to handle the load of necessary equipment for the operations they’ll be supporting. Whether that load be suspended or lifted up, the tray should accommodate without difficulty.
- Effective at Consolidating Time: A tray’s weight, dimensions, and features will all help save time. Time is life in medical operations; and without life, there is no money.
- Well-Manufactured: Whether the tray is a disposable one, or meant for continual reuse, it should be built to withstand not just procedural necessity, but the unpredictable.
- Disposable Options: Procedure packs and customizable disposable trays have, for quite a while now, been used in surgical proceedings. What these amount to is packages of necessary operation equipment that can be bought in bulk already-sterilized and ready for operation. Both trays and equipment can be acquired this way, saving time and energy in operational preparation and performance. Again, when time is life, expense is tertiary. Though disposable customizable options may be more costly, they will definitely be more effective at helping speedy operations that may save lives.
Dependability of Manufacture and Shipping
When ordering custom trays, be sure to get them from a source which has a solid history of steady, accurate delivery. Medicine is an endlessly necessary function of modern society. As such, the needs of medical facilities increase as the population does. Though shipping, purchasing, and reprisal occur in a cyclic way, there are perpetual demands for equipment; especially of the disposable sterilized variety. As a result, it is not uncommon for custom procedural packs or custom trays to become lost, or mixed up, during shipment. Sometimes custom trays are purchased in bulk, and individually wrapped in a sterilized way containing all necessary operational equipment. But when the first custom trays are opened from the shipment, it is found the items inside do not correspond to the items requisitioned. Such mix-ups are going to be more common among manufacturers who are new to the market, or are perhaps overloaded with clientele. To avoid this, you should order custom trays in dual shipments and keep firm records of contents when they arrive. The better organizations will certainly ship the right items without additional expense to the surgical practice in question. Such errors should not happen, but they are subject to human imperfection, and so they cannot be curtailed; only recognized and planned for.
Reusable Custom Trays
While it is possible to find custom trays that are reusable, and so won’t ever ship with the wrong contents, sterilization can be difficult on-the-fly, and unless some unique system be devised by your practice, will not be something that can be accomplished as quickly as simply opening a pre-sterilized pack. Still, some delicate procedures may require direct reusable customization.
