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IDEAS That Work
Practical pearls from your colleagues
DRYING ENDOSCOPES A homemade manifold made of tubes, "Y" connectors
and stopcocks lets you dry up to 4 scopes at a time.
SCOPE TURNOVER
A Better Way to Dry Your Endoscopes
E
ndoscope drying is as important to the prevention of infection
as cleaning and high-level disinfection are. But properly drying
scopes takes time — it takes 45 minutes to dry a single scope
by our protocol — and can be a real impediment to fast turnover. To
help shorten the time between reprocessing and reuse, I came up with
a manifold system that can dry up to 4 scopes at a time.
I built the system out of tubes, "Y" connectors and stopcocks from
available materials. It lets us quickly dry all of an endoscope's internal
channels. Here's how it works. After the automatic disinfector and
alcohol cycles are complete, we put the scopes on a cart to dry, first
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O U T PAT I E N T S U R G E R Y M A G A Z I N E O N L I N E | J A N U A R Y 2013
