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Marketing a Surgical Instruments Wholesale and Manufacturers Business

It's becoming more and more difficult for surgical instruments wholesale and manufacturers businesses to rise above the clamor of the marketplace. Innovative marketing strategies may be your best bet for out-promoting -- and outperforming -- the competition.

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We see marketing as the great equalizer, a business discipline capable of dramatically increasing a small company's footprint in the marketplace.

Time and time again, we see ingenuity, hard work, and industry knowledge as the deciding factors for surgical instruments wholesale and manufacturers business marketing success.

Marketing Expertise

Don't have a background in marketing? That shouldn't stop you from taking a larger promotional role in your company by educating yourself about today's most effective marketing concepts. Entrepreneurs and leaders of surgical instruments wholesale and manufacturers businesses need to make every dollar count, especially when it comes to their marketing budgets. Although a learning-by-doing approach is typical in this industry, we advise young marketers to seek the input of experienced professionals before committing time and resources to untested marketing concepts.

Price Matching

Price matching is a protection for buyers who are concerned that they could find a better deal elsewhere. For businesses, price matching eliminates buying risk, convincing cautious consumers to buy now. The principle is simple: Since pricing is a primary factor in product selection, your business agrees to match advertised competitor pricing. Without price matching, if they can locate lower pricing from a competing surgical instruments wholesale and manufacturers business, potential clients will abandon your brand in droves. Survey the marketplace. If competitors have adopted price matching strategies, you have no choice but to adopt price matching as well, even if it means reshaping your business model to accommodate a new pricing structure.

Public Relations Strategies

Marketing and public relations are two distinct promotional disciplines. While marketing flows blatant advertising messages to audiences, PR takes a more educational and informative approach. If you want to send unrestricted marketing messages to your audience, buy a mailing list and perform a direct mail campaign. But if your strategy calls for sophistication, media buy-in and thought leadership, hire a PR consultant. The key to effective PR is to use nuanced messaging to attract the attention of reporters and media representatives. If reporters smell promotional content, they will back off from the story or create their own narrative.

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Additional Resources for Entrepreneurs

Tools designed for use during surgery

A surgical instrument is a medical device for performing specific actions or carrying out desired effects during a surgery or operation, such as modifying biological tissue, or to provide access for viewing it.[1] Over time, many different kinds of surgical instruments and tools have been invented. Some surgical instruments are designed for general use in all sorts of surgeries, while others are designed for only certain specialties or specific procedures.

Classification of surgical instruments helps surgeons to understand the functions and purposes of the instruments. With the goal of optimizing surgical results and performing more difficult operations, more instruments continue to be invented in the modern era.[2]

History

Many different kinds of surgical instruments and tools have been invented and some have been repurposed as medical knowledge and surgical practices have developed. As surgery practice diversified, some tools are advanced for higher accuracy and stability while some are invented with the completion of medical and scientific knowledge.

Two waves in history contributed significantly to the development of surgical tools.

In the s, inventions of aseptic surgeries (maintenance of sterile conditions through good hygiene procedures) on the basis of existing antiseptic surgeries (sterilization of tools before, during, and after surgery) led to the manifestations of sale and use of instrument sterilizers, sterile gauze, and cotton. [3] Most importantly, instruments were advanced to be readily and effectively sterilized by replacing wooden and ivory handles with metals.[3] For safety and comfort concerns, the tools are made with as few pieces as possible.[3]

Hand surgery emerged as a specialty during World War II, and the tools used by early hand surgeons remain in common use today, and many are identified by the names of those who created them.[4]

Individual tools have diverse history development. Below is a brief history of the inventors and tools created for five commonly used surgical tools.

Scissors

Knife to scalpel to electrocautery

• Primitive knives were made of perishable materials such as sharp leaf margins or bamboo.[6] After the Dark Ages, Muslims, and later European countries started to develop surgical instruments, scalpels, for cutting.[6]
• In , King Gillette developed a double-edged safety razor blade with a disposable blade.[6] After 10 years, Morgan Parker, an engineer, developed and patented another type of disposable scalpel, consisting of an overlapping blade locked into a metal handle that allows for easily replacing dull and used blades with fresh sterile blades.[6] Compared to the Gillette ones, this new blade provides stability whilst still being able to exchange blades between uses.[6]
• Despite the knowledge that heat can control bleeding since the sixth-century BC, it was not until the 18th-century that people started to use electricity to generate heat for cautery. William Stewart Halsted was the pioneer of the technique, which later was called Diathermy.[7]
• In , physician Joseph Rivière used electrical current to treat a benign carcinomatous ulcer on the dorsum of his patient's hand.[8] Then in , Physician Karl Franz Nagelschmidt used diathermy to treat lesions as well as the coagulation of vascular tumors and hemorrhoids.[9]
• In the early s, William T. Bovie proposed the use of different current (flow of electrical charge of the carrier) for cutting and coagulation.[6] Bovie collaborated with Dr. Harvey Cushing, which led to the birth of &#;Bovie&#;, a diathermy apparatus. It allows for careful dissection of tissue while maintaining hemostasis.[6]

Retractors

• During the Renaissance, retractors were lacking so the surgeons uses their fingers to supply the necessary retraction of tissue exploration.[10] Albucasis, a pioneer of modern medicine, devised numerous hooks for surgical retraction including circumcisions, tracheostomies, hemorrhoidectomies, and central extractions in his famous book Al Tasreef Liman &#;Ajaz &#;Aan Al-Taleef around AD.[11]
• In the 19th century, Doyen abdominal retractors were invented by French surgeon Eugène-Louis Doyen.[10] The doyen retractors are auto-static, self-retaining retractors that are used primarily in abdominal OB/GYN procedures. It facilitates the completion of difficult surgeries by providing improved exposure.[10]
• In the late 19th century, Nicholas Senn, an early adopter of Listerism, felt that having a smooth surface on a surgical instrument was important to help to prevent infection.[10] Thus, he developed what is now called the Senn retractor, a double-ended retractor with an end of three bent prongs that may be dull or sharp, and it was often used in plastic or vascular surgery procedures.[10]
• The Weitlaner retractor, invented by Franz Weitlaner in , is a self-retaining, finger ring retractor with a cam ratchet lock used for holding back tissue and exposing a surgical site that allows the surgeon to activate using a single hand.[12] His invention inspired the invention of more retractors, such as Adson-Beckman retractors for general surgery and Chung retractors for orthopedic surgery. [10]

Forceps

• Back in the 6th century BC, laboring caused a high mortality rate for both mothers and newborns due to the hours or days of the lasting delivery process.[13] This problem led to the establishment of forceps-assisted delivery in the 16th century by the Chamberlen family.[13] Forceps were later developed over several centuries by leading obstetricians of the time including James Simpson, Neville Barnes, and Christian Kielland.[14]
• Michael Ellis DeBakey invented one of the most common and well-known DeBkey forceps.[15] The vascular atraumatic forceps (DeBakey)were widely used for grasping vascular tissue and causing minimal damage to the vessels.[15] This invention led to the development of the Dacron aortic graft for the repair of aortic aneurysms.
• Around the mid s, Alfred Washington Adson, a pioneer in neuroscience at Mayo Clinic, invented Adson forceps that allows the lifting and removal of neural tissue.[15]

• Hemostats are forceps that aim to obliterate the lumen of vessels and to obtain adherence to the crushed surfaces and vascular hemostasis.[16] Originally, this notion of crushing did not exist and arterial catch forceps simply clamped vessels temporarily prior to ligature or cautery.[17]
• In , Eugene Koeberle, who accidentally found arterial forceps with a catch closure came away spontaneously without the need for ligature, and invented &#;pince hémostatique,&#; which have pin and hole catches. [18]
• In , the Kocher clamp was created by Emil Theodor Kocher, who significantly contributed to thyroidectomies (removal of all or a part of the thyroid gland) and decompressive craniotomy.[16] This invention decreases the risk of contamination while cutting dense tissue.
• Later, Dr. William Henry Welch and William Stewart Halsted contributed to the invention of clamps and Halsted-Mosquito Hemostats, which were used to clamp small blood vessels.[16] Kelly clamp, invented by Howard Kelly, has similar functions but it can clamp larger vessels due to the slightly larger jaw.[19]

Accordingly, the nomenclature of surgical instruments follows certain patterns, such as a description of the action it performs (for example, scalpel, hemostat), the name of its inventor(s) (for example, the Kocher forceps), or a compound scientific name related to the kind of surgery (for example, a tracheotomy is a tool used to perform a tracheotomy).[20]

Classification

There are several classes of surgical instruments:[21]

Terminology

The expression surgical instrumentation is somewhat interchangeably used with surgical instruments,[27] but its meaning in medical jargon is the activity of providing assistance to a surgeon with the proper handling of surgical instruments during an operation, by a specialized professional, usually a surgical technologist or sometimes a nurse or radiographer.[28][29][30]

An important relative distinction regarding surgical instruments is the amount of bodily disruption or tissue trauma that their use might cause the patient. Terms relating to this issue are 'atraumatic' and minimally invasive.[31]

See also

Gallery

References

Bibliography

• Wells, MP, Bradley, M: Surgical Instruments A Pocket Guide. W.B. Saunders, .