Tick-tock: keeping up with the reprocessing clock

Endoscope reprocessing is essentially a race against the clock to remove harmful bacteria from drying on the scope and developing into a potentially dangerous biofilm which can be detrimental to patient safety. Multi-society guidelines recommend that reprocessing should take place within a particular time period, yet the time stated to complete reprocessing varies widely throughout the world. Is the current system efficient enough and is there a way to make time constraints in reprocessing more standardised?

When an endoscope is removed from the patient immediately after the procedure, pre-cleaning should commence. Pre-cleaning is a critical step for patient safety which can sometimes be overlooked. The pre-clean removes gross debris from the scope to avoid the formation of biofilm, in preparation for the endoscope's onward reprocessing journey. From here, the endoscope must go to manual cleaning within a particular time limit, if this does not happen a delayed reprocessing protocol must be followed, as per endoscope manufacturer's IFU.

In the UK, the British Society of Gastroenterology (BSG) and the NHS Health Technical Memorandum 01-06 (HTM) advocate that the decontamination process should commence as soon as the endoscope has been removed from the patient. The cleaning stage of decontamination should be completed and the endoscope washer disinfector (EWD) cycle commenced within 3 hours of completion of the procedure as best practice.^1,2