Ensuring patient safety in sterile processing requires that three key elements of the process work in concert, experts say.

People, processes and products must coordinate smoothly to keep a sterile processing department running effectively, according to a recent recap in Healthcare Purchasing News (HPN) of the Healthcare Sterile Processing Association’s annual conference, held this year in Las Vegas.

“Many breakdowns of a workflow or barriers to truly effective and efficient workflows tend to stem from improper or lack of training and education coupled with a lack of proper working equipment to expedite tasks,” Rebecca Peplau, a central sterilization department manager in Augusta, Maine, said in an HPN interview.

Decontamination training, for example, can be a slow process. But failures in the process can massively add to workloads, she notes.

Peplau also described ongoing challenges with instructions for use (IFUs), a topic that both the Association for the Advancement of Medical Instrumentation (AAMI) and the Association for Professionals in Infection Control and Epidemiology (APIC) have addressed recently.

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Related Content: IFU Improvements Sterile Processors Would Like to See

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One idea: U.S. hospitals should consider adopting European standards such as regularly testing items for residual protein as they come out of washers.

In a Beyond Clean podcast, Rory Burke, who was a medical supply technician at a VA hospital in Montana at the time of the recording, said his department does mandatory testing on all its endoscopes. Protein residue testing identifies both living and dead organisms across a wide spectrum of proteins, so it picks up even neutralized bioburden that is still present.

Also, given that some IFUs require use of a borescope, Peplau thinks it should be a mandatory piece of equipment.

“If you can’t see inside of the device, how can you know it is truly safe to use on a patient?” she asked in HPN.