What Is Operating Room Sterilization?
Destroying microbes in order to prevent the spread of infections is crucial to maintaining the health of both patients and hospital staff. An important example of this is the struggle against infections that patients can get during their hospital stay. If we list the causes of this type of infections; we see that, contaminated equipment, unsterilized surgical instruments or improper personnel hygiene are the leading causes of infection.
Why Is Hospital-Operating Room Sterilization Important?
Hospitals should ensure that, as part of a standard duty of care, all measures are taken to help keep their patients healthy and safe.
One of the most important steps to be taken by the hospital management to help protect patients is to ensure that only sterile equipments are used in the hospital by establishing mandatory procedures about this.
What Are The Dangers That Can Occur If Hospitals Do Not Use Sterile Instruments?
A) RISK OF INFECTION
If there are unknown substances on the surgical instrument, it can cause a certain part of the body to be exposed to bacteria. This could mean an increased risk of infection.
B) RISK OF DISEASE
There are some cases where surgical equipment is not properly sterilized after use. In these cases, there is a possibility that very dangerous diseases such as infertility, HIV, AIDS, hepatitis and more will be transmitted from one patient to another.
C) RISK OF DEATH
The spread of certain bacteria as a result of contamination of certain medical equipment can lead to terrible infections and even death.
What Are Hospitals ' Plans To Fight To Prevent The Spread Of Infection?
Every hospital should have a combat plan to prevent the spread of infection. The hospital's fight against microbes consists of three basic strategies in turn;
1) Pre-Cleaning
2) Disinfection
3) Sterilization
First attack against microbes and bacteria: "pre-cleaning"
When we use the term" cleaning", we mean the process of eliminating all visible dirt, dust or other impurities. This means that the equipment cleaned by soap, detergent and water is free of physical and chemical residues and gets rid of most microorganisms.
The main purpose of pre-cleaning is to reduce the biological load. Biological load (or initial contamination) refers to the population of living organisms on a tool, product, or package. Depending on where and how products are used, basic cleaning may be enough to reduce the biological load, but for most other types of medical equipment, pre-cleaning is only the first step. This will be followed by either disinfection alone or sterilization after disinfection. In other words, cleaning is always the first step in disinfection and sterilization of equipment.
There are five main reasons why cleaning all medical equipment is so important:
1) Protecting the next patient to be operated with the same equipment from exposure to dangerous complications by freeing them from all blood, pus, dirt or foreign particles remaining from the previous operation.
2) reducing biological load
3) eliminating the breeding ground of surviving microbes
4) prevent wear of highly sensitive and expensive surgical instruments.
5) ensure the safe transfer of equipment to be placed and packed for disinfection or sterilization
Second Fight: Disinfection
When we use the term disinfection, we mean the destruction of only harmful bacterial species that can withstand harsh conditions, rather than killing all vegetative (living) microorganisms and all bacterial spores. Some types of bacterial spores are very dangerous. Like anthrax and tetanus.
Hospital rooms and services can be disinfected with chemicals, while medical equipment is placed inside a kind of automatic washing machine . Substances that come into contact with body fluids or human faeces, such as bedspreads and urinals, must be disinfected with the help of a "scrubber disinfector" machine. But the vast majority of medical equipment will need to be subjected to disinfection and then sterilization.
Final Attack: Sterilization
After undergoing pre-cleaning and disinfection, the equipment is now ready for sterilization, the last and most serious method of germ destruction. This method briefly aims to kill all microorganisms, including bacterial spores. The WHO recommends that all surgical instruments that are likely to come into contact with intrabody fluids,, be sterilized before use.
Sterilization methods are as follows;
Humid heat
Dry hot
Biocide with gas or chemicals
Radiation
Status Of Autoclaves In Operating Room Sterilization
The most common standard used for sterilization in the industry today is to use pressurized high-temperature steam to kill all microorganisms in a special machine called an autoclave. Inspired by the pressure cooker model, modern autoclaves operate various loops for liquids with different equipment and materials. They can consist of different sizes from small microwave oven size to big hospital elevator. Depending on the daily needs of the hospital, one or several autoclaves can be kept for sterilization of all equipment used during operations.
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