When the Peterborough District Hospital sterile services department moved into the newly-built Peterborough City Hospital, it had an opportunity to redesign its storage and handling systems to better suit its processes.
The new storage solution has created time-savings which have helped the department to keep up with the cost-saving pressures being brought to bear across the NHS. SUZANNE CALLANDER reports.
In 2010, the Peterborough District Hospital Sterile Services Department (SSD) was moved to the new Private Finance Initiative (PFI) Peterborough City Hospital. Today, the SSD serves 23 theatres internally, while externally supplying 54 local GP surgeries and around 15 podiatry clinics in the region. The department is open from Monday to Friday 7.30 am to 7.30 pm and from 8 am to 4 pm on Saturday. It is staffed by 17 w.t.e Band 2 SSD technicians, four Band 3 supervisors, a Quality Assurance (QA) manager and a sterile services manager. The enforced move gave the department a blank canvas to improve the design of its storage area within the new facility. Debbie Clow, sterile services manager at Peterborough City Hospital, explains more about the design of the new facility: “When we moved to the new hospital we asked all the SSD staff whether they thought there was an easier way of running the department, so they were very involved in the redesign process and in all the decisions that were made. “Within the new storage facility we additionally had to create space to hold all theatre instrumentation. Previously, once sterilised the kit would be returned to theatres. However, it was decided that the newly designed SSD should hold the kit and provide a trolley prep service for the theatres, preparing the kits necessary for each list.” At the same time that the SSD took over responsibility for storage of the theatre instruments there was a move to the B Braun container systems for all theatre instrument sets, which offered a more modular solution. “The kits are now sorted into sections by specialty which allows us to store a great deal of kit in a small space. We also opted for colourcoding of the lids, for ease of identification, again by specialty type i.e. green for orthopaedic trauma, blue for ENT,” said Debbie Clow. The containers are available in a series of different sizes, with lids and reusable filters. Small padlock style seals are used to lock the containers. These are only broken when the set is ready to be used
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