tion area, through the cleaning, inspection, assembly, packaging, ster-
ilization and cooling process. While some of this time is equipment-
dependent — such as a 32-minute washer cycle versus one that's 1
hour and 15 minutes — this measurement also captures the speed of
your manual cleaning, inspection and assembly process to give you a
good sense of the true speed of flow through your department.
Unprocessed trays at 7 a.m.
This indicator will cue you into potential volume versus staffing
misalignments, as it measures the number of trays from the previous
surgical day that are still sitting unprocessed at 7 a.m. While a high
number of trays left over in the morning does not necessarily mean
staffing is insufficient — especially if you have an overnight shift— it
might signal you to take a closer look at your overall process.
Missing instruments & incomplete trays
Measuring the ongoing completeness of your surgical inventory
is another key indicator of reprocessing quality. Most instrument-
tracking systems allow for simple reports for this metric on a daily,
weekly or monthly basis to identify trends in the types of instruments
going missing, and how often trays are being reprocessed without all
the requested instrumentation. Some larger facilities can be missing
thousands of instruments at any given time.
Request & delivery times
This compares your expected delivery times for a requested
instrument from an OR to the time it takes your staff to locate and
deliver the item to the customer. If your SPD is located in the sterile
core on the same floor as the OR, this might only be a 2-minute target.
But if your SPD is 2 floors below in the basement, it could be closer
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Infection Prevention
IP
