ly, by your OR staff.
This may seem burdensome to time-crunched nurses and techs,
notes Karen Swanson, LPN, CSPM, CFER, sterile processing manager
at Connecticut Children's Medical Center in Hartford, Conn., and chair
of the Certification Board for Sterile Processing and Distribution
(CBSPD). "There's a lot of equipment to clean and disinfect. They
know the room must be turned over quickly. In a hurry, people may
not be pre-cleaning at bedside," she says.
But sending untreated scopes to reprocessing is a prescription for
damage and danger, especially since they might not get immediate
attention once they arrive there. A lack of pre-cleaning will surely
complicate the rest of the process.
"It's like leaving dirty dishes in the sink. If you let them go too long,
they dry out and it's difficult to get the soil off," says Chris Lavanchy,
engineering director of the health devices group at the ECRI Institute
in Plymouth Meeting, Pa. Inadequate endoscope reprocessing topped
the non-profit research firm's annual list of health technology hazards
this year. "Material that dries on scopes will be nearly impossible to
remove, especially in lumens. It's difficult to get into those and brush
those off."
Once pre-cleaning is completed, coil the instruments into a contain-
er to prevent their contact with anything else while they're transport-
ed to SPD.
Step 2: Cleaning
Once the scopes reach the decontamination room, time is an issue. In
Ms. Swanson's view, 2 questions weigh over the process. Can your
techs prioritize scopes, so they don't wait unreasonably long for clean-
ing? And, do your physicians know exactly how long it takes to proper-
ly reprocess a scope, so their demands for turnaround don't undermine
8 8 • O U T PA T I E N T S U R G E R Y M A G A Z I N E • A P R I L 2 0 1 6
