Decontamination: First, do no harm

CSC Chairman, Val O’Brien, welcomed delegates to this year’s conference and explained the theme of the day: “First do no harm - a study day to explore the essentials of medical device decontamination.” Val said, “We take the basics of decontamination to another level to explore the potential to do harm if effective decontamination is not undertaken, and the need to perform routine surveillance to evaluate patient outcomes beyond just the surgery or procedure, and sadly in some cases the need to perform patient look back exercises and determine how failures can affect large numbers of patients.” 

Chair, David Jenkins, welcomed the first speaker of the day, Karren Staniforth, a clinical scientist from Nottingham University Hospital. In her role as scientific lead, Karren covers all environmental and engineering aspects of infection prevention and control. She began her talk – ‘How critical is Spaulding? Is it time to re-evaluate the risk?’ by asking delegates: “The Spaulding Classification is quite old – so is it still relevant? 

“Decontamination is the entire process required to remove or destroy contaminations, while infection control is minimising the likelihood of transferring infection from one patient to another.