Surgical Instrument Tray with Visual Locking Bars
Find Innovative SolutionsGenerate Solutions
Solution Overview
Problem
Surgical instrument management in operating rooms is inefficient due to the time spent searching for missing instruments, leading to increased surgery duration, reduced hospital efficiency, and additional costs, as existing organizers do not effectively account for the correct number of instruments post-procedure.
Innovation Solution
A tray with indentations shaped to fit specific surgical instruments, featuring locking bars that pivot to indicate missing items and allow for easy identification of full or empty wells, along with optional perforations for steam sterilization, ensuring all instruments are accounted for and efficiently managed.
Engineering Contradictions & Design Principles
Engineering Contradiction Analysis
1Loss of time
If traditional instrument trays are used, then instruments can be stored, but time is spent searching for missing instruments and accounting for them
Solution Approach 1:
The tray incorporates visual feedback mechanisms through color-coded indicators and locking bars that provide immediate visual information about instrument availability and accounting status, eliminating the need to search for missing instruments and enabling rapid verification of instrument accounts
Solution Approach 2:
The tray uses color-coded indicators and colored locking bars to provide visual feedback about instrument status - different colors indicate different states of instrument availability and accounting, allowing surgical staff to quickly identify missing instruments without time-consuming searches
2Quantity of substance
If instrument wells are made deep to accommodate multiple instruments, then instrument capacity increases, but the tray becomes more complex
Solution Approach 1:
The tray is divided into multiple instrument wells, each with standardized depth and configuration, allowing modular organization of different instrument types while maintaining consistent structure across all wells, thus increasing capacity without proportionally increasing overall complexity
3Strength
If the tray is made solid for structural integrity, then strength increases, but sterilization effectiveness decreases
Solution Approach 1:
The tray incorporates perforations or porous structures that allow steam or chemical sterilization agents to penetrate through the tray body, ensuring thorough sterilization of both the tray structure and contained instruments while maintaining sufficient structural integrity through optimized perforation patterns
Data Source
Figure 1
Figure 2
Figure 3
AI summary
An organizer for holding surgical instruments includes a tray that has instrument wells extending from the top surface of the tray. The instrument wells may be open to allow high-pressure steam to reach the instruments in the wells. The organizer has two sections. The first section contains sterile instruments to be used during surgery, and the second section contains empty instrument wells, each of which has a shape and depth corresponding to the shape and depth of an instrument well in the first section. After instruments are removed from the first section and used during surgery, they are returned to the corresponding instrument well in the second section. After surgery, an instrument is missing unless all the instrument wells in the second section are full. Structure may be associated with the instrument wells to indicate that an instrument well is not full.