Vigilance vital to ensure high standards

With effective surgical instrument decontamination critical to ensuring that harmful pathogens are not passed from patient to patient, and, for example, an acknowledged risk that human brain degenerative diseases such as vCJD, Alzheimer’s disease, and Parkinson’s disease, may be transmitted from person to person via contaminated instruments, an IHEEM seminar in Birmingham recently examined effective device decontamination, and the quality of surgical instruments generally, with some found to be defective even when unpacked straight from the factory. Among leading experts to pass on valuable guidance at the seminar, titled ‘Dirty Little Secrets 2’, and held at the Hilton Birmingham Metropole Hotel, was Tom Brophy, lead medical engineering technologist at Barts Health NHS Trust. As HEJ editor, Jonathan Baillie, reports, he gave an interesting follow-up to a presentation he made on the same topic at an earlier IHEEM ‘Dirty Little Secrets’ seminar in February 2012. 

As with the first IHEEM ‘Dirty Little Secrets’ seminar, which was held at the same venue three and a half years previously, this year’s IHEEM decontamination seminar on 30 June focused on some of the patient risks associated with instruments that have passed through the decontamination process, but have failed to be decontaminated sufficiently to prevent them harbouring blood, body tissue, and other ‘debris’ which may be passed to a subsequent patient during surgery, with all the attendant infection risk. 

When he spoke at the original ‘Dirty Little Secrets’ seminar in February 2012, which, as with this year’ event, was chaired by Graham Stanton, a senior decontamination officer at NHS Wales Shared Services Partnership who also chairs IHEEM’s Decontamination Technical Platform, Tom Brophy explained how in 2000 the then Barts and the London NHS Trust had established its own surgical instrument quality assurance section. This was mainly because, as he and his co-authors from the Department of Clinical Physics at St Bartholomew’s Hospital, and the Department of Vascular Surgery at The Royal London Hospital, explained – in a 2010 Hospital Healthcare article, New surgical; instruments: a question of quality¹ – ‘we had no confidence that new instruments were undergoing a real quality control process’.