Ideas That Work: How We Got Our Flashing Under Control

GOOD TIMES The combination of planning ahead and changing sterilization parameters can dramatically reduce your incidence of flashing.

How We Got Our Flashing Under Control

Is your facility resorting to immediate-use steam sterilization more often than you'd like? If so, consider doing what we did.

Keeping up with our busy schedule was extremely challenging, so when the instrument set currently being used in an OR would also be needed for the next procedure, we got into the habit of flashing (using IUSS). It seemed to be the only way to keep up. We knew our rate was unacceptably high — citation high, in fact — but brainstorming and weekly meetings to discuss the problem were having little impact.

Finally, we hit on a way to get it under control. First, we began to look at the next day's surgery schedule and carefully plan ahead. And we assigned a person from SPD to be in charge of processing and wrapping sets we knew we'd need to turn around quickly.

We also noticed that our small sterilizers have a pre-vacuum mode just like our large autoclaves. So we changed the parameters in our small sterilizers to the same parameters we use in our main processing department — 4 minutes with a 20-minute dry time — and used the same biological indicators. What we found was that the new approach took only 3 to 7 minutes longer than flashing. We could afford that.

Plus, by planning ahead, we could have someone from SPD retrieve an instrument set as soon as a given surgery was over and the surgeon had begun closing. That gave us extra time to clean and decontaminate the instruments that had just been used, so we could have them ready in time for the next case.

There's an additional advantage in that if we end up not using a set, it's wrapped, so we can just put it on the shelf for when we do need it, instead of being stuck with an open set we'd then have to re-sterilize. It's all part of our quality improvement initiative. Our QI team tracks how we're doing and reports back to SPD monthly, so we know how much we've improved

Danny Dillard, CST, CRCST
Andrews Institute
Gulf Breeze, Fla
[email protected]