Tech in Surgery Prep / Unit 12 TSC 298 review, 2 to 3 minutes
Naming Ten Instruments on a Tray
The idea
A worked example, constructed for this course, walks a new scrub person through naming ten instruments on a basic tray by family first and name second.
In practice
Quinn, a student surgical technologist, stands at a basic tray with an experienced mentor. The mentor says to start with the family, then find the name. On the left is a knife handle with a curved blade: cutting family, a number ten blade on a number three handle, for the skin. Beside it, two pairs of scissors. The heavy pair with short blades, straight, is a straight Mayo, for suture. The long, slender pair with fine tips is a Metzenbaum, for delicate tissue. Next come thumb forceps. One pair has smooth, fine tips: a DeBakey, for gentle grasping. A small pair with a tooth pattern at the tip is a toothed Adson, for skin. Then the ring-handled clamps. A small curved hemostat is a mosquito, for small bleeders. A larger curved hemostat is a Kelly. One clamp has jaws bent at a right angle: a right angle clamp, for passing ties around vessels. Another has a smooth, rounded window at the tip: a Babcock, for holding bowel without crushing it. At the end lies a ratcheted instrument with short, stout jaws: a Mayo-Hegar needle holder. The mentor asks Quinn to say what each one is for, not only its name, and to point out which ones are sharps and which have teeth.
Where people slip
Quinn named every instrument by asking two questions in order: what family is this, and what job does it do. That habit scales to the thousands of instruments in specialty sets, because new instruments are usually variations on these families. A name alone helps in a quiz; a name with its job helps in a case.
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