494583

Nursing

Central Sterilization Supply Department (CSSD)

The Central Sterilization Supply Department (CSSD) is an integrated service in hospital that performs sterilization and other actions on medical devices, equipment, and Supplies. This unit ensures safe management of decontamination services in the healthcare through safe, efficient, effective, and reliable systems. This Department provides complex services including the preparation of sterile medical supplies for operating room and all other units and departments in the Children’s Cancer Hospital Egypt 57357.

The scope of the tasks and responsibilities of CSSD places it as a department which deals with the prevention of nosocomial infections and represents one of the core aspects of comprehensive health care. This Department provides specialized hygienic operations (complex pre-sterilization preparation, steam sterilization, plasma sterilization) whose outputs are sterile medical supplies. In order to routinely supply the hospital with all necessary sterile material, the management of the department closely cooperates with the leading employees of the operating rooms and inpatient and outpatient clinics. The main aim of the Department of Central Sterile Supply is to guarantee a high quality and level of sterilization for all medical supplies. Protection of all patients is critical to our work.

The Central Sterilization Supply Department is divided into five major areas: decontamination and processing, assembly, sterilizing, sterile storage, and distribution.

The objectives of central service include the following:

  • Disinfection, mechanical treatment, and manual treatment of all medical supplies in automatic washers with adjustable and controlled parameters. The machine-controlled washing is carried out in a closed system and uses thermal-chemical or thermal disinfection. The quality of pre-sterilization preparation is checked and performed by different indicators.

  • Organizing and completing surgical instruments into sets by qualified technicians as well as Medical supplies are packed into special single-use or reusable sterile packs in qualified manner.

  • Visual control of completeness, preparation and packing of surgery room cloths by preparing and packing the cloths either in single item packs or set packs according to requirements of individual operating rooms or other departments and units in all over hospital.

  • Moreover, Plasma sterilization is used for thermo labile reusable medical supplies (made of plastic). The sterilization medium is a low temperature plasma created in a high frequency electromagnetic field that interacts with vapors of 58 percent hydrogen peroxide in a high vacuum. Plasma sterilization is a dry sterilization process. All sterilization processes are carried out in modern machines with controlled parameters and written records providing details of the sterilization processes. All sterilization processes are rigidly monitored by both chemical and biological indicators.

  • Moist heat or autoclave sterilization is used for medical products that are made of metal, are porous, hollow or otherwise thermos stable. The sterilizing medium is saturated water vapor, which transmits thermal energy by condensing on medical supplies. Furthermore, the employees of the department carry out final inspections by using different indicators test to ensure quality of sterilization. The department takes care of the delivery of the sterile medical supplies.