From normal interaction to an emergency situation

Most sales reps for Cook will tell you that our role is unique. Our reps’ role is special because of the impact we have on patient care and on healthcare providers being able to do their job better. In Critical Care, we rarely get to see our products used on patients. Most of our products don’t get scheduled on an operating room board. Instead, they get opened and used under stress– during an emergency and when a patient is in the most distress.

One example of this is when a patient has a pneumothorax, meaning that there is air accumulating in their chest cavity, which causes a lung to collapse, and so the air must be drained to allow the re-expansion of the lung. Many physicians have been trained on placing chest tubes the conventional, surgical way: making a deep incision, spreading apart the small space between the ribs with forceps to dissect through the tissue, swiping their own finger inside the incision to further separate any adhesions, and then finishing the procedure by inserting a large chest tube.¹

In order to provide a less invasive method for draining a pneumothorax, Cook offers the Wayne Pneumothorax Catheter, which can be inserted using either the minimally invasive Seldinger or Trocar techniques. The Wayne Pneumothorax Catheter is a small-bore pigtail catheter, a type of small diameter catheter which has been found to have comparable efficacy to large diameter chest tubes in patients with pneumothorax.

From normal to emergent

When we do get to see how a product works in a real-world scenario, it is often dramatic. This was the exact case for me when a hospital in eastern Alabama wanted to look at our Wayne Pneumothorax Catheter earlier this year, and the situation switched from a normal interaction to an emergency situation.

You can watch the video below to hear my take on this day.

After everything that happened, and with everyone feeling so grateful and relieved that everything went so well for the patient, I was invited into the hospital’s purchasing department to review a number of their products. Thanks to our life-saving, quality product, and a bit of our quality Cook customer service, new doors were opened for us to do even more business with this hospital.

Even after all this time, just thinking about that day still gives me goosebumps.

Citations

1. Pneumothorax. Mayo Clinic Web site. https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/pneumothorax/ symptoms-causes/syc-20350367. Accessed January 24, 2020.

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Written by Jason Mullis, District manager, Critical Care

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