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Chris Lavanchy, engineering director of the Health Devices Group at ECRI Institute, has extensive experience working with sterile processing departments and provides his insights regarding the imperatives of proper medical device reprocessing.

ICT spoke with Patti Koncur, CRCST, CHMMC, ACE, education coordinator, and Natalie Lind, CRCST, CHL, education director, both of the International Association of Healthcare Central Service Materiel Management (IAHCSMM), about the challenges professionals face when working in the sterile processing (SPD) and central sterile supply (CSSD) departments.

As the chief scientific officer for Xenex Healthcare Services, I see firsthand the selection process for room disinfection systems at many facilities. As with any hospital purchasing process, multiple individuals are involved. The biggest difficulty is that the people involved may all be asking different questions. Some individuals may get very interested in the different technologies while others will only care about the economics of the purchase. I believe that by taking the group through a question forming exercise, the selection process can be streamlined. Of course, before getting to the question, it is best to understand the problem.

A recent discovery of "hypervirulent" Salmonella bacteria has given UC Santa Barbara researchers Michael Mahan and Douglas Heithoff a means to potentially prevent food poisoning outbreaks from these particularly powerful strains. Their findings, in a paper titled "Intraspecies Variation in the Emergence of Hyperinfectious Bacterial Strains in Nature," have been published in the journal PLoS Pathogens.

How often are outbreak investigations being conducted at U.S. hospitals? Fairly frequently, according to a group of researchers who also sought to examine the various triggers for investigations, the types of organisms involved, and the control measures being utilized by healthcare facilities. They also discovered that norovirus caused 18.2 percent of all infection outbreaks and 65 percent of ward closures in U.S. hospitals during a two-year period.

Today, most HAI surveillance is passive, relying on data retrospectively gathered from medical records. Conversely, active surveillance involves prospective steps to identify patients who have or who may develop HAIs, using standardized definitions of infection, pre-determined criteria, and protocols that result in risk-adjusted HAI incidence rates.