Adriaan Posthuma highlights the importance of inspecting flexible endoscopes, to ensure patient safety. He provides an insight into the risks of biofilm and protein residues, outlining the steps required to ensure quality assurance.
The cleaning of flexible endoscopes has always been considered difficult to validate due to the inability to inspect the cleanliness inside the lumens of an endoscope.¹ However, the latest advancements in technology have allowed the development of flexible inspection camera systems that can check the internal channels of an instrument for damage and debris, which could help in the reduction of infection rates. There are two categories of endoscopy-related infections²:
Exogenous infections come from a pathogen entering the patient’s body from the external environment. One way in which this can occur is human error in the reprocessing of flexible endoscopes. It has always been notoriously difficult to ensure that the internal channels of a flexible endoscope are clean, free from debris, or articles that have no place to be in the channels such as stents from a previous procedure, all of which carry infection risks and potentially worse.
Cleaning brushes
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