The first step to ensuring your facility’s instruments are properly cleaned and sterilized is grasping the importance of the tasks and appreciating the hardworking staff members who perform them. “Surgical leadership must support sterile processing professionals and give them the tools they need to provide ORs with safe instrumentation,” says Harry Mullen, CRCST, CIS, CHL, CER, chief executive officer and managing director at Central Sterilization Solutions, a trade school in Southern California. “I teach my students that they’re not just sterile processing technicians. They’re infection control professionals.”
He suggests conducting regular competencies to make sure staff follow sterile processing’s guiding principle: You can clean without sterilizing, but you can’t sterilize without cleaning. “It’s not simply a matter of fulfilling surgeons’ needs to have instrumentation,” says Mr. Mullen. “It’s a matter of doing the job correctly each time.”