Meeting the purified water needs of SSDs

Operating theatres rely heavily on the support of hospital sterile services departments (SSDs) to supply them with clean, sterilised equipment. SSDs therefore require large volumes of high purity water for a range of uses, from endoscope and equipment washing and sterilisation, to rinse water for automated washer disinfectors and to autoclaves which sterilise equipment and supplies using high pressure saturated steam. In addition, high purity water is used as a final rinsing agent to remove any remaining traces of detergent and sanitising agents from washer disinfectors and to provide steam for thermal disinfection. Purified water is a vital supply within hospitals, playing a pivotal role in every aspect of the decontamination process. In this role it must also meet required standards for washer disinfectors, endoscope reprocessors, clean steam generators and autoclaves. To meet these standards and ensure a constant supply of the correct grade of pure water, many hospitals will install a water purification plant with a circulating ring main. However, several different grades of pure water are required for these applications, and SSDs can vary greatly in terms of size and requirements. Hospital SSDs require the hygienic sterilisation of operating instruments to ensure safe implementation practices within operating theatres and a high and consistent volume of purified water for use as final rinse in automated washer disinfectors or endoscope reprocessors to remove any trace contaminants from instruments or endoscopes. There is also a need for traceability. Hospitals are capable of investigating and tracing sources of contamination and this requires permanent documentation of all procedures. This has led to the development of water purification technology that incorporates an integrated validation programming system, which constantly records water quality and system status.

The cost of HAIs

 In recent years, incidents of patients contracting hospital-acquired infections (HAIs) have cost the NHS dearly and, while most statistics seem to indicate that the situation is improving, the accumulated financial figure is now well past the £1 billion mark. In 2010, the BBC reported that, according to the most recent estimate, the cost of treating HAIs in the NHS is about £180 m per year. Professor Jacqui Reilly, head of the healthcare-associated infection and infection control group at Health Protection Scotland, was one of many commentators who recognised that infection rates still represent a ‘substantial burden’ every year and that, ‘efforts should continue to focus on preventing and controlling these infections to the irreducible minimum.’ In response to such findings, hospital staff are increasingly employing high performance water purification units as a crucial part of the disinfection process and manufacturers are enhancing their products and services to provide everincreasing levels of defence against infection.