STERILISATION OF SURGICAL EQUIPMENT:
we clean the healthcare professional’s tools in order to protect against the risk of infection

Using contaminated surgical instruments can indeed result in the transmission of microbes and infections

• from patient to patient,
• from healthcare worker to patient,
• from patient to medical staff.

Servizi Italia supports hospital and healthcare facilities in the prevention and control of infections by

• supplying and sterilising surgical equipment coming from different hospital departments,
• providing bespoke procedure packs and kits for any type of medical procedure or operation,
• scheduling the maintenance of surgical instruments and keeping back-up supplies so that they can be quickly replaced,
• managing the sterilisation facility, from the planning stage to the approval stage.

Opting to outsource the sterilisation of medical equipment, as well as ensuring effective infection prevention, also brings with it a not insignificant benefit: at a time in our history when we are faced with a lack of doctors and hospital staff in general, our healthcare facilities can devote a higher number of resources (both human and otherwise) to the care of patients.

Sterilisation is a specialised process which must be carried out in facilities that benefit from specific architectural, logistical and functional characteristics and in environments that are regularly subjected to strict inspections.

Servizi Italia adapts or makes any necessary modifications to its central sterile services departments, which are either near or within the hospitals themselves.

Each central sterile services department is designed to provide:

• well defined separate areas for each stage of the process: a dirty area for the initial laundry service operations (collection, decontamination, manual and automatic washing); a clean area for the following cleaning operations (checking, repair if necessary, reassembly and packaging); a sterile area where, after autoclave sterilisation the item is stored and later distributed to the various operational units and to the operating block;
• contamination control rooms where conditions relating to lighting, temperature, humidity and microbial contamination of the air and surfaces are constantly monitored.

During a surgical operation, the medical staff are under enormous pressure: the success of the operation, in fact, will have direct consequences on the life and health of the patient.

In order to prevent the risk of errors or infections, the operating theatre must be well organised and efficient. This also applies to the surgical instruments which, as well as being properly sterilised, should be suitable for the different types of operations.

Each operation requires a specific procedure kit; not having the right instruments to hand and correctly positioned may

• cause delays and consequently increase costs
• even compromise the success of the operation.

Servizi Italia provides hospitals with tailor-made procedure packs based on the surgeon’s and operating theatre’s requirements; all our kits, after being checked and if necessary modified, are arranged and packed in such a way as to

• contain everything required for the operation in a single pack
• enable the surgical team to quickly identify each individual item
• avoid any contamination and ensure asepsis within the operating theatre
• assemble, disassemble and reorganise the operating theatre in the shortest possible time
• reduce the amount of packaging to be disposed of once the procedure is over.

There may be multiple requirements for the operating theatre with regards to surgical equipment and in order to adequately meet them, by providing the appropriate instruments every time, there is only one strategy: traceability.

All the central sterile services departments run by Servizi Italia have traceability software installed, which automatically identifies the equipment and checks all the stages of the process (cleaning, sterilisation, logistics, maintenance requests).

Furthermore, the instruments contained in the kits are uniquely identified by a talking alphanumeric code: the traceability code enables users to recover the data on the sterilisation process and to put the surgical equipment back together quickly, efficiently and without errors.