Considerable challenges inensuring patient safety

John Prendergast, a decontamination engineer working within the specialist team at NHS Wales Shared Services Partnership / Specialist Estates Services dedicated to decontamination and reprocessing of medical devices, considers ‘the array of standards that are in place to provide rules, guidance, or characteristics, for various decontamination activities’. He also sets out some of the key steps to take to ensure that instrument decontamination is undertaken to the high standards needed to ensure patient safety.

I will start this article by citing a well-known aphorism, ‘If you always do what you always did, you will always get what you always got’. This very much applies to the decontamination of surgical instruments, and to the ensuing risks if this vital activity is not undertaken to the highest standards.

It is, of course, the clear responsibility of healthcare organisations to ensure that all medical devices used for clinical procedures are decontaminated appropriately. However, what is appropriate here? Device manufacturers’ instructions, EN ISO standards, national guidance, CFPPs (Choice Frameworks for local Policy and Procedures), theoretical research, external advisers, and professional institutes, will all present a different opinion as to the correct and ‘best’ methods.