Surgeons rely on reusable instruments that someone has cleaned, inspected, assembled, packaged and sterilized. That someone works in sterile processing — usually out of sight. This week, we’re saying thank you.
This week is yours. The decontam shifts, the tray builds, the IFU checks nobody outside the department sees — thank you. Keep your skills and CEUs current with our free newsletter.
Most people have never heard of sterile processing until someone tells them. Start with what the department actually does, then see whether the work fits you.
Recognition lands best when it’s specific. Name the catch someone made, the tray they rebuilt, the new tech they trained — and say it where the OR can hear it too.
Surgery is a team sport and one of the teams works out of sight. Three things worth knowing about them.
Before a tray reaches the OR it has been cleaned in decontamination, inspected piece by piece, assembled, packaged, sterilized and stored — then tracked back out again. Most of that happens below ground or behind a door most hospital staff never open.
The CRCST credential covers seven domains, and full certification requires 400 documented hands-on hours in a department. New Jersey and Pennsylvania require certification by law.
Evenings, nights and weekends included. Surgery schedules, loaner trays and emergency cases all land on SPD, usually without the patient ever knowing the department exists.
Sterile processing is younger than surgery and older than most hospital departments. The milestones, in order.
Ignaz Semmelweis, working in a Vienna maternity clinic, required doctors to wash their hands in a chlorinated lime solution between the autopsy room and the ward. Deaths from childbed fever fell sharply. The idea that unseen contamination kills was born here.
Joseph Lister published his results using carbolic acid on wounds, dressings and instruments. Surgical infection, until then treated as inevitable, became something a surgeon could prevent.
Charles Chamberland, in Louis Pasteur’s laboratory, built the first autoclave. Robert Koch’s experiments soon after showed moist heat under pressure outperformed dry heat — the principle behind every steam sterilizer in a hospital today.
Hospitals stopped sterilizing on each ward and brought the work into one central department with trained staff, standard processes and records. The sterile processing department as we know it dates from this move.
The association now known as HSPA (the Healthcare Sterile Processing Association, formerly IAHCSMM) was founded, giving the profession its own body, credentials and standards voice. Sterile Processing Week is its annual recognition of the field.
AAMI ST79 and ST108 set the steam-sterilization and water-quality expectations surveyors check against. Several states, New Jersey and Pennsylvania among them, require technicians to hold certification. The job has become a profession.
Curious about the career? Come to our free open house in Cherry Hill on Sat Oct 24 — meet instructors who have worked hospital sterile processing and ask anything.
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See class dates in Cherry Hill and live virtual, or talk to a real person about which format fits.