The Infection Control Today® sterile processing page provides an inside look into the sterile processing (or central supply) department in the hospital where surgical instruments are cleaned, sterilized, and reprocessed in order to disinfect, remove bioburden, and prep for upcoming procedures. Sterile processing applies to not only the knives, scalpels, scissors, forceps, and clamps used in surgery, but also instruments such as endoscopes and duodenoscopes. ICT® reports on the latest technology but also on the means to disinfect that technology. Also, the trend toward making more disposable surgical equipment. What does that mean for the sterile processing team?
May 14th 2024
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Medical Crossfire®: Maximizing Patient Outcomes in Shingles – Are You Leveraging Guideline Based Care?
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Understanding RSV: What You Need to Know to Prevent and Treat Respiratory Syncytial Virus in Your Patients
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Respiratory Syncytial Virus: Understanding the Infection Burden and Anticipating the Impact of Vaccines
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Medical Crossfire®: Which Patients with Hematologic Malignancies are at Risk for Secondary Immunodeficiency (SID)… and How Can We Leverage Evidence to Improve Their Outcomes?
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Patient, Provider, and Caregiver Connection™: Prevention and Control of Meningococcal Disease — Individualizing Vaccine Recommendations in Adolescent Populations
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Avoid Long Delays in Instrument Decontamination, Reprocessing
January 24th 2017Q: There has been a question from the staff here about leaving instruments overnight with an enzyme foam product on them. If we are here and a case comes in where the instruments were treated with the enzyme foam and we have time to wash them but will not be here long enough to run the load of instruments through the washer, is it best to leave them with the enzyme foam overnight or hand wash them and have ready to be put in the washer in the morning?
Protein Disrupts Infectious Biofilms
December 8th 2016Many infectious pathogens are difficult to treat because they develop into biofilms, layers of metabolically active but slowly growing bacteria embedded in a protective layer of slime, which are inherently more resistant to antibiotics. Now, a group of researchers at Caltech and the University of Oxford have made progress in the fight against biofilms. Led by Dianne Newman, the Gordon M. Binder/Amgen Professor of Biology and Geobiology, the group identified a protein that degrades and inhibits biofilms of Pseudomonas aeruginosa, the primary pathogen in cystic fibrosis (CF) infections.