TRACEY MILLER discusses the challenges posed by the Choice Framework for local Policies & Procedures (CFPP) and highlights the importance of vigilance, training and transparency, to ensure patient safety.
Medical device decontamination is an invisible service. Traditionally, medical decontamination has not been an issue that has drawn the public’s interest. Even most clinicians do not think of it – until there are delays in the availability of instruments or a postoperative infection occurs. This all changed when CJD began to make front-page news. This was followed in short succession by stories around ‘superbugs’. The next few years were marked by a level of ministerial oversight and a speed of change quite unknown to the industry and its practitioners.
Clinicians, and an increasingly large number of patients, rightly demand assurances that their decontamination is being completed in accordance with ‘best practices’. What a fleetingly small number are aware of, however, is that due to rapidly changing legislation and guidance, the industry is now in a rather unenviable position where something as simple as ‘current standards’ is almost impossible to define.
The historical context
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