The expanded Central Sterile Services Department opened to capacity this week to both acclaim and relief for the theatre complex at PA Hospital.
The essential service has almost doubled its floorspace after the resumption of nearby office and training spaces to better service the busy surgical throughput at one of the state’s busiest surgical hospitals.
Nurse Unit Manager of CSSD, Tom Ward said the much-needed space was mostly about function given the burgeoning traffic of surgical loan sets to PAH to accommodate increasing numbers of complex surgeries.
“There is a direct correlation between complex cases and the complexity of the loan equipment,” he said. “This impost on CSSD amounts to hundreds of hours for just one case.”
“A recent example of this would be a spinal tumour procedure which involved a delivery of 156 trays and 18 tubs of implants for that single case,” he said.
The actual sterilising of a delivery this size can amount to hundreds of hours with multiple members of the team involved. Four loan staff check those trays, the entire staff in decontamination are responsible for loading those trays into washers, and half again will be responsible for checking and wrapping those trays to go to theatre.
“The minimum turnaround on this transaction alone is about eight hours.”
Tom said the reality is that not all trays delivered for a complex case will be used – but the CSSD are responsible for sterilising the whole set regardless.
“If you look at the acuity of the patients and cases we are seeing, the loan area is the most likely to need revision again in the near future because of the inevitability of us relying on loan kits for these very complex cases.”
The expansion of CSSD has benefited three main functions of their processing:
- Decontamination – now has much more space with additional sinks and workflow improvements for both safety and capacity.
- Loans – the standardised workflow improvement with added space has resulted in process adoption by staff for more effectiveness and even more loan categories.
- Storage – is now double the footprint to accommodate a change to the standards for storage of sterile stock, in addition to being data-logged, temperature-controlled, including hepa-filtration. It is basically a lab for prepared trays.
The CSSD team and Division of Surgery hosted a tour of the new space for PAH Executive and Metro South Health leadership on Monday 22 June.
Reflecting on the expanded space and importance of the work done in this unique environment, Tom’s enthusiasm was evident. “It’s interesting stuff!”