Surgical Instruments

Is flash sterilization still allowed? It is the question every new theatre manager asks, and the honest answer is: the word is gone, the practice is not, and the rules around it are much tighter than they were twenty years ago. “Flash” described an abbreviated steam cycle run in a small sterilizer next to the […]

Many of the staining complaints that reach an instrument maker are not steel problems at all. They are water problems. A tray comes back from a hospital with white spots on the ring handles, rainbow-coloured film on the shanks and a few pinpoint pits near the box joints. The first question from the CSSD is

Every other pathogen your sterile services department handles has a membrane, a nucleic acid, or a protein coat that steam at 134 °C will wreck. A prion has none of those. It is a misfolded form of a protein the patient’s own body already makes, it carries no genome, and the thing that makes it

A cycle record from a washer-disinfector usually ends with a line such as “A0 3000 — PASS”. It is the single most important number on the printout, and it is also one of the most misunderstood. It is not a temperature, not a time, and not a measure of how clean the instruments are. It

What does a parotidectomy tray actually need that a general soft-tissue set does not? Fewer instruments than most people expect — but finer ones, and a handful that cannot be substituted. The operation is defined by a single structure: the facial nerve, running through the gland in a plane that is often only a few

Picture the middle of a classic submucous resection. The mucoperichondrial flaps are elevated on both sides, a long Killian speculum is holding them apart, and the deviated quadrangular cartilage sits exposed at the bottom of a tunnel perhaps 8–10 mm wide. The surgeon wants a strip of that cartilage out in one piece, cleanly, without