In the meantime, someone had—with a stroke of genius—realized that this entire
threat could be completely eliminated by simply protecting the exposed conductive ends
of the patient’s catheter. Proper terminations for transarterial catheters providing low
impedance pathways to the heart and great vessels became the order of the day, and electrically sensitive patient’s need for special environmental consideration disappeared
almost overnight. Articles on electrical isolation of the patient appeared. See, for example, Guidelines for Clinical Engineering Programs; Part I: “Guidelines for Electrical
Isolation” (Ridgway, 1980).
A byproduct of this extended episode, however, was the discovery that the existing
quality of maintenance of the typical hospital’s ever-expanding inventory of electronic
equipment was inadequate. A new high intensity focus on equipment maintenance and
safety was born.
Another interesting sidebar is the parallel, then subsequent, debate about the rationale
for perpetuating the isolated power requirement in operating rooms where the use of flammable agents had been prohibited. The original requirement for isolated power had been
introduced into the NFPA standards governing anesthetizing locations in 1941, along with
other antistatic measures intended to reduce the number of accidents due to the ignition
of flammable agents such as cyclopropane.