Central Processing Department recognized for providing the highest standard of care

In the Central Processing Department (CPD) at Brigham and Women’s Faulkner Hospital, skilled technicians receive, sterilize and deploy instrumentation needed in the operating rooms and other procedural areas. To ensure patient safety, every instrument must be sterile when it leaves their department. To guarantee this, the department monitors every load for sterilization using a biological. The team was recently honored for its commitment to this best practice by the 3M™ Sterilization and Cleaning Monitoring Program.

“The most current standard of care for steam sterilization is Every Load Monitoring. That means we run a biological on every load of instruments we process,” says Sara Lourie, Central Processing Department Manager. “We’re required do run a biological weekly and it’s recommended that we run a biological daily, but the best practice is every load. Not everyone has adopted this practice as it’s an expensive process. But it is the best standard of care and provides the highest level of safety for our patients.”

For her team, practicing Every Load Monitoring is another step in a complicated process, but one that everyone agrees is important. “A biological means a vial of live bacteria goes into the load with the sterilization. Then we incubate it to make sure we have killed it with the sterilization process,” explains Lourie. “We’ve improved our process so that our biologicals are now 24-minute read outs, which means an instrument can go straight to the operating room after sterilization. We used to have to wait three hours for a biological read out. Now we can guarantee that every tray that comes through our department has a negative biological as soon as the sterilization process is complete.”

Their 3M Sterilization and Cleaning Monitoring Program recognition is testament to the team’s dedication to patient safety. “It’s recognition for the hard work the staff is doing and shows we are providing the best quality care that we can in CPD,” says Lourie.