The Practical Application of a Method of Assessing Defective Theatre Scissors

Beesley et al. described a method of assessing the efficacy of theatre scissors. It would be interesting to see the data comparing old and new scissors and whether there is a significant difference. The authors did not indicate why they chose 190 g as the test weight. Since different individuals exert different forces and use subtly different techniques when using scissors, there is a need to correlate between the objective performance in this test and subjective performance by different surgeons. We feel that if a surgeon considers a pair of scissors to be defective then different scissors should be used even if they have been tested with this method and ‘passed’. Also, this method only assesses the efficacy when cutting suture material and not any other material or tissue requiring cutting during surgical procedures. The time taken to perform this assessment on a pair of scissors suspected to be defective may well be as time consuming as sharpening or tightening them. Whilst this is a novel and objective method, we feel that it may have limited value in the average theatre department.