Outpatient Surgery Magazine

Wake Up to the Dangers of Sleep Apnea - October 2018 - Subscribe to Outpatient Surgery Magazine

Outpatient Surgery Magazine, providing current information on Surgical Services, Surgical Facility Administration, Outpatient Surgery News and Trends, OR Excellence and more.

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4 4 • O U T PA T I E N T S U R G E R Y M A G A Z I N E • O C T O B E R 2 0 1 8 W e're on a mission to eliminate high-level disinfection. Anyone who has seen closeups of the crud, corrosion and con- taminants left behind on a reprocessed scope knows that we need to shift from GI scope disinfection to terminal steriliza- tion. If we here at the Altru Health System in Grand Forks, N.D., have any say in the matter, that shift will happen sooner than later. A lot sooner. A few months ago, we became the first-ever facility to sterilize GI scopes. It was a big deal, for sure, not just for our central sterile department, but for every reprocessing room in every surgery center and hospital. A new low-temperature sterilizer from TSO 3 made this possible. The Sterizone VP4 uses dual sterilants — vaporized hydro- gen peroxide (H 2 O 2 ) and ozone (O 3 ) — to achieve terminal steriliza- tion of heat- and moisture-sensitive medical devices. In the same amount of time it takes to high-level disinfect, we can terminally ster- ilize multi-channeled flexible endoscopes (with a maximum of 4 chan- Jenni Gibbs | Grand Forks, N.D. The Shift From Disinfection to Sterilization We overhauled our GI scope reprocessing process in pursuit of our ultimate goal: to eliminate high-level disinfection. • SHIFT TO STERILIZATION The Altru Health System in Grand Forks, N.D., is the first U.S. facility to terminally sterilize GI scopes with a low-temperature sterilizer. E N D O S C O P E R E P R O C E S S I N G Altru Health System

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