Reducing Flash Sterilization with ISIP Manager

Reducing flash sterilization is a key focus for quality assurance and best practice. And processing instrumentation within the SPD department with adequate time for biological indicators to verify instrument integrity is the gold standard.

However, anyone working in the operating room knows, there are times when instruments become contaminated, commonly a result of accidentally being dropped from the sterile field. When this happens, a circulating nurse often has two choices. The first is to flash sterilize the dropped instrument. The second and preferred choice is to get a substitute instrument from a peel packed single or if necessary, another instrument set. However as surgery is paused and a surgeon waits, quick replacement becomes very important. If there is a barrier to quickly locate a substitute, the circulator will often find it easier to flash the dropped instrument rather than leave the surgical suite to find a replacement if it's location isn't readily known.

When implemented by an organization, ISIP Manager seeks to solve this problem by giving surgical staff an intuitive and accessible tool to identify and locate surgical inventory within the department, the result of this is reduced flash sterilization, reduced patient time under anesthesia and an overall decrease in operating cost though more effective use of the surgical instrument resources in your operating room.