Ergonomic Strategies for Successful Hair Transplant Procedures

Announcer:
You’re listening to DermConsult on ReachMD. On this episode, we’ll hear from Dr. Marc Avram, who’s a dermatologist, hair loss and transplant specialist, and Clinical Professor of Dermatology at New York-Presbyterian Hospital/Weill Cornell Medical Center. He’ll be sharing ergonomic strategies for successful hair transplant procedures. Here’s Dr. Avram now.

Dr. Avram:
One of the challenges of hair transplantation from a physician, staffing, and patient point of view is the length of the procedure. Why does the procedure take so long? The definition of long is multiple hours, from two, three, or four hours up to six, seven, or eight hours. Why so long? Because we're removing hundreds or thousands of individual hairs from the back and moving them the front.

In order to do that, ergonomics is critical for everyone in the room. It's critical that the patient is comfortable at all times. And what does that entail? Being in a comfortable position when we're harvesting from the back and laying in the back in a comfortable position when placing grafts in the front.

Part of ergonomics is good temperature in the room, good conversation in the room, and allowing patients to take a break if they want to stretch or go to the bathroom or eat something. We want this to be a pleasant experience.

That's also important for physicians and for staff as well—for us to be comfortable. How can you work well over many hours if you're not in a comfortable position? So, we adjust the table to a point where we're not bending over. We make sure there's excellent light, we make sure the temperature is good, and we allow people to rotate in and out and take a break. So, we have a floater that moves in and out.

We tell patients, “We will be adjusting you so you're comfortable and we're comfortable so we can all be comfortable for optimum long-term results.” So, it makes the procedure efficient by good ergonomics, and in a career, good ergonomics is important to prevent musculoskeletal damage to staff and physicians who do this day in and day out over years and decades.

Announcer:
That was Dr. Marc Avram discussing ergonomic considerations in hair transplant procedures. To access this and other episodes in our series, visit DermConsult on ReachMD.com, where you can Be Part of the Knowledge. Thanks for listening!