Failure of sterilization is an important event. Receiving a positive bioindicator (BI) from a sterilizer can be devastating and raises patient safety concerns as it can lead to infection.

Here are 4 simple and standard sterilization procedures that can help reduce the human factor and reduce the risk of infection.

1. Monitor the equipment to know whether your medical sterilizer works normally.

To monitor the vacuum auxiliary steam sterilizer, a Bowie-Dick test is performed at the beginning of each day to detect leakage, inadequate exhaust, inadequate steam penetration, and the presence of noncondensing gases, any of which may jeopardize sterilization.

2. The use of exposure monitoring products can quickly know whether the packaging is exposed to steam during sterilization.

This step ensures that the employee handling the item has exposed the package to steam during the sterilization process without having to open the package or check the load monitoring records.

3. Use package monitoring to help verify that specific exposure conditions are met.

Internal monitoring of packaging, pallets and containers using chemical indicators can verify that the sterilizer has penetrated into the chemical indicator placement points in the packaging and that specific exposure conditions have been met.

4. Monitor each load with a bioindicator.

Load monitoring is the process of monitoring and releasing loads based on the results of bioindicators (BI) in the process Challenge device (PCD). Only BI can detect the actual killing of microbial spores in the sterilizer. If all spores die in BI, you can be confident that other infectious organisms may also die in the sterilizer.

The key to the success of the sterilizer is to analyze the cause of failure, put forward management countermeasures and strengthen the maintenance and maintenance of the sterilizer.