A group of healthcare organizations is working to develop new tubing standards in attempts to prevent potentially harmful tubing misconnections.
The luer is the standard tubing connection on many medical devices. This common attachment poses the risk of attaching tubes to a wrong connector, which can be life-threatening. For example, if a non-invasive blood pressure insufflation tube is erroneously connected to an intravenous line, air under pressure could enter the bloodstream, causing an air embolism.
To avoid such errors, organizations such as the Association for the Advancement of Medical Instrumentation and the International Organization for Standardization are working to develop standards limiting the universality of the luer fitting and design new connectors that only connect with the proper tubing.
New standards for connectors are expected to be released in 2014.
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