Richard Bancroft, BSc(Hons), science and technical director at STERIS Corporation,discusses the importance of high performance detergents for cleaning reusable medical devices.
Water, detergent and time, together with mechanical action, are generally accepted as the key variables for successful cleaning of reusable medical devices. Herbert Sinner described the inter-relationship for cleaning between mechanical action, chemical (detergent) action, time and temperature in a water-based system, as long ago as 1959, and his work gained widespread knowledge as Sinner’s Circle. The key aspect of Dr Sinner’s approach is that the Circle can be described as a summation of all factors needed in order to clean optimally (see figure 1).
But perhaps one of the most useful applications of the Sinner Circle concept is that all of these variables are inter-related; a reduction in one of the variables will necessitate an increase in one or more of the other variables. The opposite is also of course true; increasing one of the variables can reduce the others. As well as consideration of external factors like energy and water consumption, the commodity that we would always like more of in our daily lives is time, hence it is possible to optimise the Sinner Circle variables to allow a reduction in process time, but necessitating an increase in the other variables (see figure 2).
Cycle variables - temperature
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