Much attention is concentrated on the requirements placed on processing services from whom their customers expect any equipment that is delivered back to be clean.
Barend ter Haar BSc DPhil, a director of BES Healthcare and BIOtAK, who sits on BSI, European, and ISO decontamination standards committees, explains that in the medical environment, we also need to consider the requirements for processing other equipment that may be beyond the usual remit of the CSSD.
What do we mean by ‘clean’, and what aspects are most important to different departments? This article addresses these different requirements, and summarises relevant updates in technologies and standards that have been materialising recently, while questioning at times whether the right approaches are always being applied
Let’s start with what we mean by ‘clean’. The recently updated British (BS), European (EN), and International (ISO) Standard (BS EN ISO 11139)1 provides definitions that relate to decontamination, examples of which can be found in Figure 1; further definitions can be found in the Glossary of the BHTA Decontamination of Medical Devices Guide.2
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