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Jan 21, 2021 | Sterile Processing Best Practice

How Surgical Tracking Technology Can Keep Your SPD Compliant

Surgical tracking technology can help you keep your SPD compliant in many different ways, but one of the most overlooked ones is in managing (and protecting!) your team members. That’s right—surgical tracking technology can help you stay compliant specifically by tracking and managing competencies for each one of your team members.

Competency in General Reprocessing

AAMI recommendations state that all staff should be competent with all equipment they process. If a staff member completes a processing step that they haven’t yet been trained on, your department isn’t in compliance with regulating bodies. Rather than maintain a paper trail and put additional responsibility on yourself and other managers to manually track everyone’s competencies and the corresponding tasks that can be assigned to them on a daily basis, automated surgical tracking technology can take over the job.

Surgical tracking technology tools that come with competency modules are capable of keeping track of each staff member’s training and certifications. Thus, competency modules serve as a quality protection barrier for your facility, preventing staff members access that they are not qualified or trained to complete. If a staff member tries to perform a task or process in the tracking system the system will issue an alert and prevent the staff member from accessing and documenting the task.

You know this better than anyone: just one wrong step can pose a huge threat to both your facility and your patients. Having automated oversight like this for your team is valuable not only for the protection it provides but also for the compliance it offers.

Competency in Endoscope Reprocessing

Endoscope reprocessing can be a challenging task for under or non-qualified staff members to perform. Because of the particular danger that endoscopes can pose to patient safety if improperly processed, it stands to reason that your staff members should obtain thorough training to be able to safely reprocess an endoscope.

Once your staff members complete their training and pass their competency in endoscope reprocessing, you can enter that information into your automated surgical tracking technology to unlock that workflow for them. Just as with the competency tracking in general reprocessing, the system will issue an alert if any other staff member tries to reprocess endoscopes but isn’t cleared to do so and help keep you compliant with the endoscope reprocessing guidelines.

Is Your Surgical Tracking Technology Keeping You Compliant?

If you already use surgical tracking technology in your department, check to see if it can provide help in tracking competencies in your staff. If you don’t currently use any tracking tools, keep this in mind as you consider purchasing one. Make sure to ask the sales teams you interact with if their surgical tracking technology offers help in tracking competencies for your staff, and if features such as locking the system if competency is not complete or expired.

Here at Censis, our comprehensive surgical asset tracking and management tool—CensiTrac—comes with competency verification logic. As noted above, it gives managers the ability to block staff members from accessing certain workflows if they don’t meet the right competency requirements. You get all the benefits of automating your surgical asset tracking with the added peace of mind of our competency module. To learn more about CensiTrac, visit this page or reach out to our team here.

Resources:

25+ Powerful FOMO Statistics to Skyrocket Sales (2020). January 3, 2020. https://optinmonster.com/fomo-statistics/

ANSI/AAMI ST79, Comprehensive guide to steam sterilization and sterility assurance in health care facilities. 2017

AST Guidelines for Best Practices for Laundering Scrub Attire. April 14, 2017. https://www.ast.org/uploadedFiles/Main_Site/Content/About_Us/Standard%20Laundering%20Scrub%20Attire.pdf

Laundry and textile hygiene in healthcare and beyond. July 1, 2019. http://microbialcell.com/researcharticles/2019a-bockmuehl-microbial-cell/

Role of healthcare apparel and other healthcare textiles in the transmission of pathogens: a review of the literature. March 31, 2015. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7132459/

Study of bacterial flora associated with mobile phones of healthcare workers and non-healthcare workers. June 9, 2017. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5719508/