Underinvestment in training creates systemic risk

Sterile services may go unseen, but they serve a safety-critical role which, when it fails, has potentially catastrophic implications for patients, staff and healthcare organisations. In an increasingly strained financial climate, there is a need for greater visibility and focus on the function of sterile services within NHS Trusts and private healthcare, to enable these departments to make a strong case for their funding to be protected and increased.

Underinvestment in staffing and training may feel like a difficult but necessary choice when frontline services are threatened, but this decision carries with it high risks to patient safety and fosters long-term problems around recruitment, progression and retention within a critical healthcare science. In this paper, we examine how budgetary and operational pressures are affecting decontamination and offer multiple examples of how these problems manifest and the consequences that follow. It will be argued that investment in decontamination services, and in decontamination teams, in particular, is the only approach that reduces overall costs while enhancing patient safety.

The NHS faces unprecedented challenges in maintaining safe levels of provision across the UK, while facing sustained operational and budgetary pressures. Chronic underinvestment over recent years, combined with the shocks delivered by the COVID-19 pandemic, have combined to create an environment where every spending decision needs to be closely scrutinised and each penny spent in the NHS has to have a clear justification.