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No Guarantees - March 2017 - 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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"Yes, we sterilize all of them." "No, you don't. You disinfect your scopes — you don't sterilize them." But if high-level disinfection is as unreliable and unpredictable as many make it out to be and if flexible scopes are fundamentally diffi- cult to decontaminate, maybe scopes should be sterilized. "We should be moving away from high-level disinfection and going toward sterilization due to uncertainty in the process," says Mr. Lavanchy. "A gaseous approach is more reliable because it can get to surfaces with- in the endoscope that liquid germicides may not be able to reach." Theoretically, he says you could sterilize endoscopes with ethylene oxide, but this can be dangerous for technicians because the gas may be carcinogenic. "That's not the only problem," says Mr. Lavanchy. "Ethylene oxide may degrade the devices." Many consider flexible scopes to be surgical devices, no longer used solely for diagnosis, but to snare polyps and biopsy lesions. "Would you use instruments that aren't sterile for surgery?" asks Ms. Ofstead. It's a question, unfortunately, her study has already answered. OSM 4 0 • O U T PA T I E N T S U R G E R Y M A G A Z I N E • M A R C H 2 0 1 7

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