Preventing Skin Breakdown and Electrode-related injuries: the topic of the ASET 2015 Symposium at our annual conference

                                             Can we prevent this??

Over the years I have received countless phone calls and e-mails from technologists, lab managers, nurses and physicians who have observed skin breakdown at electrode sites.  One can’t deny that this has become a hot topic nationwide!  Several hospitals have initiated their own research into the nature of these injuries.  We all have a common goal to reduce the chance of skin breakdown.  One of our major challenges is to determine what factors contribute to skin breakdown.  Since every lab and every technologist utilize unique methods and combinations of products for skin prep, adhesive and conductive gels, it is very difficult to come up with a precise answer to this question.

For the first time ever, we are going to film and live stream an ASET event so that technologists at home can hear the symposium and participate in the discussion via a chat room!  Please use this link to read more on how to participate: 

https://livestream.com/GlobalMedia/ASET2015 

I am confident that the four panelists who will be presenting at this symposium will provide some insights and that the audience will also participate in discussion to help us determine "best practices" to prevent skin breakdown.  Our first panelist is a wound care nurse from Children’s Hospital of Colorado, Carol Price.   She has been a part of a team providing assessment and treatment of patients with this problem.  One of the problems we have as technologists is that we are not well informed about how the skin is structured,  how it is compromised and what conditions increase the risk for skin breakdown.  Carol’s presentation will help us understand the skin and injuries to the skin.  She will explain the assessment scale that helps categorize the severity of injuries. 

Other panelists include members of the ASET skin integrity task force who will explain what we have discovered so far, and how you can help!  One of the task force members works with pediatric and neonatal patients and she will provide an overview of what is unique about this patient population in reference to electrode related injuries.  We also will hear from Brett Netherton,  our expert on electrode injuries that occur in the O.R. during monitoring. 

If you are coming to this year’s ASET annual conference please don’t miss this event!  And if you can’t be there, please sign up to participate!  It is free!  We cannot offer ASET CEUs for this event, in part because we have never tried to do a live streaming session before and we want to make sure it all works  well.  Because it requires a significant amount of administrative time to document participation for the purpose of tracking CEUs, if we are able to offer another live streaming event in the future, we would include a nominal charge for the event to cover the cost of awarding CEUs.  We plan to make the recorded event available at some point after the conference, so please watch our website for more details.

But for now, please consider participating if you are concerned about skin breakdown.  Our current website survey is about this topic and 70% of respondents report a concern about this!