It’s the end of your shift, you’ve inspected and prepared what felt like thousands of tiny screws in an orthopedic tray. You grab the caddy, stand up, catch your foot on the anti-fatigue mat and the moment every tech dreads happens to you – the screw…
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Career growth does not happen in a vacuum. It happens in the midst of people — a large group of opinionated people. And since these opinions become the foundation of your professional reputation, it behooves you to be very aware of what those opinions are and whether or not they line up with your opinion of yourself….
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In 2011, Christina Fast, an internationally certified Sterile Processing Educator, volunteered on the Africa Mercy—the world’s largest floating hospital. While docked in Freetown, Sierra Leone, Christina visited the sterile processing department…
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Last month I touched on the topic of mold within the built healthcare environment. But what about mold in the harder to see-or-reach spaces of the hospital, such as deep in the recesses of the buildings HVAC system? Mold requires 4 basic things to proliferate, including food, oxygen, temperatures between 40-100 degrees, and moisture. All…
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If you’ve ever been a new hire in the sterile processing department, this Season 7 Rewind of Beyond Clean may bring back some…interesting…memories. We’re talking about the onboarding process and setting Sterile Processing professionals up for…
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Whether it is sports, chess, or writing an expert series month after month, practice is required to hone skills and master any craft. Manual cleaning of surgical instrumentation is no exception. It is one thing to implement a policy in your facility and it is another to make sure that people are practicing it every…
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Two words: Shift wars. Each shift in a hospital department is riddled with interpersonal dynamics but the interplay between shifts is a topic we are finally shining a well-deserved light on. It’s something that is a reality for many healthcare…
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Contaminated Instruments frequently take a one to two-hour trip from the end of treatment to the start of soak time in Central Processing. Meanwhile blood and other soils are drying to create biofilm and corrosion. The challenge for the healthcare facility is creating a team process to prevent formation of dried soils and biofilm on…
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You wake up this morning, grab your cup of coffee and head into work. You get there to greet a new department – one that you have very little familiarity with – the Sterile Processing Department. You have a couple of days to observe the state of…
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As healthcare professionals, we go to great lengths to make sure that our Operating Rooms are safe and that the sterility of medical devices is maintained to prevent harm to patients. What if, after all that effort, the culprit for spreading illness…
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