Spotlight: Medical Device Reprocessing
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Aline Young (CSS Lead) and Kathy Bonitz (Adult O.R. Nurse) are experienced professionals when it comes to building orthopaedic instrument sets as Aline and Kathy have been with CAMTA for 11 and 6 years respectively
What happens to reusable surgical instruments after they have been used in surgery? They are sent to the medical device reprocessing department. In Quito, a number of students, lay people, and nurses make up our reprocessing team. First, the instruments must go through a decontamination process where they are scrubbed clean of all biological material such as blood and bone. Next, the freshly washed instruments arrive in a clean assembly area where sets are pieced together according to the binder of set lists. Once the sets are completed, and double-checked, they are wrapped with a robust puncture resistant cloth material that can be penetrated by steam or gas yet acts as an effective barrier to keep microorganisms out. Once wrapped, the set is sterilized in an autoclave. Medical device reprocessing is a crucial step in the hospital workflow, as this step prevent infections, ensures consistency in the operating room, and allows surgeons to perform more operations per day than instrument sets are available.
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ordon Giesbrecht (Lay Person), Nicole Masson (Student), and Steve Chevalier (Lay Person) decontaminate instruments immediately following a surgical procedure
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Ella Dunlop (Student) and Carole Dugas (Lay Person) dry the freshly cleaned instruments before passing them to the clean assembly area
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BEFORE: a batch of freshly washed instruments lay before Kathy Bonitz (Adult O.R. Nurse)
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AFTER: the instrument set has been assembled according to the set list on the left and double-checked before wrapping.jpg)
Typically, instrument trays are covered in a wrapper (disposable or reusable) and fastened with tape. When you are part of a team performing multiple procedures per day, the amount of waste can build up rapidly if using disposable materials. While in Quito, we use only reusable wrappers, and have also cut down drastically on tape use since Kathy picked up a trick from local Medical Device Reprocessing Staff. Thin rope, available from any hardware store, can be cut to specific lengths, colour-coded according to length (e.g. blue is long, yellow is medium, and green is short), then used to secure trays of a specific size like a parcel. Since the ropes can be reused many times, our waste production in Ecuador can be reduced substantially.