Ideas That Work: Cord Management Made Easy

Practical pearls from your colleagues

Cord management is a recurring problem for many nurses when they bring patients into the OR. Sometimes the best solutions for these types of nagging issues come directly from frontline staff who are forced to deal with them day in and day out.

Take Eden Hatle Machado, RN, BSN, surgical nurse for Southern Hills Hospital and Medical Center in Las Vegas, for instance. During a particularly challenging day working neuro cases, Ms. Machado kept running into the same issue over and over again when transferring patients to the OR: cords and cables in absolute disarray. “They’d fall under the wheels, and I couldn’t get the patient close to the OR table without crawling on the dirty floor to move them,” she says.

Out of sheer frustration, Ms. Machado created her own solution to the cord chaos. The result is a simple, efficient non-fixed cord holder that can adapt to various patient beds and OR tables in a variety of configurations. In addition to preventing tripping hazards, the cord holder also reduces the physical strain associated with bending, twisting or untangling mismanaged cords.

What started as a passion project quickly snowballed into Ms. Machado creating her own company. “I have done everything on my own, including product designs, logo designs, hiring engineers, consulting polymer scientists, creating a preliminary survey for data on my website and submitting a formal research proposal that’s in review with the Institutional Review Board (IRB) right now,” she says.

If you’re interested in learning more about Ms. Machado and her cord-management solution, reach out directly at [email protected]. OSM