this post was submitted on 16 Oct 2025
29 points (96.8% liked)
Ask
1106 readers
1 users here now
Rules
- Be nice
- Posts must be legitimate questions (no rage bait or sea lioning)
- No spam
- NSFW allowed if tagged
- No politics
- For support questions, please go to !newcomers@piefed.zip
founded 10 months ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Sterile processing - department that cleans and sterilizes surgical instruments. The OR loves to bitch up a storm when we find a trace of blood or something from a previous surgery left over in an instrument set. And it is a big deal - that splotch of blood can carry viable pathogens even after going through a sterilizer, which can cause a nasty or even fatal infection; so that set and every part of the sterile field it touched needs to be replaced, which is timely and expensive.
But... SPD is an extremely monotonous, uncomfortable, high stress (they know what's at stake) job that absolutely melts your brain, and we like to forget that they aren't perfect little robots.
Check your sets before bringing the damn patient into the room, preferably on an isolated mayo stand so if the set is fucked you don't contaminate the entire field - fix it and move on!
SPD are friends, not food!
autoclaving, i remember i was watching someon yt how they worked in a hospital and they had to destroy surgical instruments of PRION- disease patients, rather than cleaning it
Creutzfeldt–Jakob disease. I've run into that a single time in the ~decade I've been a surgical tech. Yeah once an instrument is used on a CJD patient, it becomes trash.
In the case I was in, we knew it was coming ahead of time, so we coordinated with SPD to basically peel pack every instrument of every set that would normally be used in that case. So, instead of one sterile toolbox full of instruments, we had like 200 individual peel packs. Also a lot of single use disposables. We opened the bare minimum to get started, and waited on everything else until the surgeon specifically asked for it. All of the garbage from that case - instruments, drapes, peel packs, even the sharps iirc - was isolated and sent for some heightened tier of destruction compared to normal medical trash.
That was a weird day.