Vigilance vital to ensure high standards

An IHEEM seminar, ‘Dirty Little Secrets 2’, recently examined effective device decontamination and the quality of surgical instruments. Tom Brophy, lead medical engineering technologist at Barts Health NHS Trust, provided an insight into some of the key issues uncovered when inspecting surgical instruments. JONATHAN BAILLIE reports.

Following on from the first IHEEM ‘Dirty Little Secrets’ seminar, ‘Dirty Little Secrets 2’ focused on some of the patient risks associated with instruments that have passed through the decontamination process, but have failed to be decontaminated sufficiently, with all the attendant infection risk.

At the original ‘Dirty Little Secrets’ seminar in February 2012, Tom Brophy explained how Barts and the London NHS Trust (now Barts Health) had established its own surgical instrument quality assurance section, following concerns that new instruments were not being subjected to adequate quality control processes.1 He made reference to his part in a BBC Television Panorama programme, also titled ‘Dirty Little Secrets’, broadcast in June 2011, which investigated the surgical instrument industry, and found ‘evidence of lax quality control and poor manufacturing practices and conditions’.