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The effective use of cleaning, disinfection and sterilization and procedures in Oral Health facilities is essential in the prevention of healthcare associated infections. Numerous published articles documenting the transmission of infection after improper reprocessing of reusable medical devices have emphasised the requirement for all health care services to use appropriate cleaning, disinfection and sterilization techniques.
CHRISP has customized the Easi-Sterilise [including the Standard Operating Procedure (SOP), Workplace Skills Assessment (WSA) and Oral Health Sterilizing Assessment tool (OHSAT)] to ensure that Queensland Health Oral Health facilities meet the minimum requirements for the reprocessing of reusable dental instruments and equipment in line with AS/NZS 4815:2006 Office-based health care facilities - Reprocessing of reusable medical and surgical instruments and equipment, and maintenance of the associated environment.
The overarching document that guides reprocessing practices within Queensland Health is the Queensland Health Disinfection and Sterilization Guidelines (2009), and is based on the requirements of relevant Australian Standards.
Oral Health facilities that undertake reprocessing activities must ensure compliance with Queensland Health policies, guidelines and relevant standards. A review of instrument reprocessing practice shall be undertaken every 6 months in all clinics that reprocess reusable dental instruments.
In 2010, CHRISP developed the Oral Health Sterilizing Assessment Tool (OHSAT) to assist Oral Health facilities meet their minimum obligations for the reprocessing of reusable dental instruments.
To assist Oral Health facilities operationalise QH policy, standards and guidelines, a set of Standard Operating Procedures (SOP), Draft Workplace Skills Assessments (WSA) and other supporting documents have been developed to provide a framework for the minimum set of standards for undertaking reprocessing activities.
These tools have been developed for use as:
The SOP's and WSA booklets are divided into 5 sections:
| Cleaning Procedures | |
| Packaging and Wrapping Procedures | |
| Sterilising Procedures | |
| Sterile Storage Area Procedures | |
| Quality Assurance |
Currently across Queensland Health - Oral Health Facilities, CHRISP in conjunction with Austmel are implementing a training program for the use of:
Pre-sterilization labelling and checking of batch labels is a five (5) step checking process. These steps are all important to ensure the items to be sterilized and sterilizer has been through the process and increase patient safety by reducing the incidence of unprocessed instruments being put back into use:
Please Note: The change of the class 1 chemical indicator on the label does not indicate sterility, but that the instruments have been put through the process. The print outs from the sterilizers are your definitive check that the full cycle has completed correctly and instruments have been sterilized.
The resources available to ensure correct use of the labels and label gun are:
To assist Dental Assistants to be involved in the annual process of Performance Qualification of the small steam sterilizers two resources have been developed.
The following documents must be used in conjunction with the Queensland Health Disinfection and Sterilization Guidelines and the Standard Operating Procedures for Oral Health:
All files are in Microsoft Powerpoint format. Click on hyperlink below and choose SAVE as your option. Save file to a shared drive folder.
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