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turer offers a plastic sink insert that not only serves as a conven-
ient caddy for transporting and protecting instruments, but also
includes a built-in temperature gauge and water and detergent
volume metering marks for exact results.
For manual washing, equipping your sterile processing staff with
the correct size and type of brushes (and enough of them, since sin-
gle-use brushes are intended as such) is important, particularly for
such lumened objects as endoscopes. Medical device manufacturers
are beginning to specify in their instructions exactly which type and
size of brushes or other cleaning implements are to be used for
reprocessing each device.
Quality control
After manual washing, rinse instruments thoroughly. Distilled or
deionized water is preferred to prevent impurities from leaving
surface residue. Dry instruments with low-linting cloths, and
inspect them again for debris or defects as they're reassembled
and organized into trays. Prepare instruments undergoing
mechanical cleaning so that all surfaces are exposed to the clean-
ing solution.
Processing personnel must have ready access to the equipment
manufacturers' instructions for use — whether they're in loose-leaf
page protectors and binders on a nearby shelf, in posters on the
wall (plasticized so you can wash them down) or online. Train
them to consistently comply with those instructions.
Central sterile service departments are implementing verifica-
tion testing to demonstrate the cleaning process is effective. This
testing is performed on instruments to demonstrate they have
been successfully cleaned. One such method relies on the biolu-
minescence of adenosine tri-phosphate (ATP), a compound found
I N S T R U M E N T R E P R O C E S S I N G
