Richard Bancroft, registered authorising engineer (decontamination) and science & technical director for STERIS Corporation, looks at the area of reusable medical devices and the types of detergents that can be used to clean them.
Water is often described as the universal solvent, and indeed, water is an excellent medium for dissolving and dispersing many substances. Water is a polar molecule, which gives it some very unique properties; we don’t often think about these properties as we live with them every day, but much of what is unique about water is due to both polarity and hydrogen bonding.
Water is not always the perfect solvent, and sometimes we need to modify or improve its properties; the most obvious example is the addition of detergents. Technically, detergents are known as surfactants (or surface active agents); they allow bonding between a polar solvent such as water, and a non-polar molecule such as a lipid, helping to allow dissolution of hydrophobic molecules into the water. They can also allow wetting of the surface by lowering the surface tension of the water; this can allow the cleaning solution to ‘wet’ or penetrate microscopic areas of the medical devices to be cleaned.
Soils typically encountered on reusable medical devices
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