Below the Hospital

How does sterile processing training affect patient safety, and what does it take to give SPD teams the tools they need? On this episode of Below the Hospital, Garland-Rhea Grisby Sr. welcomes back Malinda Elammari, CEO and founder of Crown Point Consulting, to discuss the skills, knowledge, and training that sterile processing professionals need to succeed.

Why do some instructions for use (IFUs) make sense to manufacturers but not to sterile processing teams? On this episode of Below the Hospital, host Garland-Rhea Grisby Sr. speaks to Samantha Hodge, co-owner and managing director of O'Dell & Hodge Consulting and co-chair of AAMI Working Group 15, about what happens to a medical device before it ever reaches the sterile processing department and dealing with special end of life cases like exposure to Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (CJD).

Alpa Patel of Nelson Labs joins Below the Hospital host Garland-Rhea Grisby to discuss her study alongside colleague Daniel Olsen on the impact of end-of-life processing for reusable medical devices. Since sterile processing professionals lack guidance on what constitutes the end-of-life threshold, it is critical to understand which devices can withstand reprocessing and that end-of-life depends on how often a device is reprocessed. Read the paper at BI&T: https://array.aami.org/doi/10.2345/0899-8205-59.1.128

Alex Hilliker of ChemDAQ joins Garland-Rhea Grisby to discuss chemical monitoring in the sterile processing department and how applying ANSI/AAMI ST58 can help keep you and your employees safe from overexposure to chemicals like vaporized hydrogen peroxide, peracetic acid, and glutaraldehyde.Disclaimer: ChemDAQ manufactures sensor technology used for chemical monitoring.

Martell Winters, Director of Scientific Competency at Nelson Labs, joins Below the Hospital host Garland-Rhea Grisby Sr. to discuss radiation sterilization. Check out their conversation on bioburden type and testing, material selection for medical devices, and the factors to consider when selecting different radiation sterilization modalities.