The Central Sterilising Club’s Annual Scientific Meeting explored “risk and revolution” in endoscope reprocessing and highlighted some of the innovation taking place in the sector. Louise Frampton provides an insight into some of the key discussion points.
Jim Tinsdeall, an AE(D) with over 30 years' experience in the NHS, including health estates, gave a thought-provoking discussion on the key considerations around recent innovations in endoscope cleaning. He opened with a key message with relevance for sterile services today — both in terms of the human tendency for blame culture and the importance of retaining the original safety lessons from historical safety incidents.
He illustrated the point with the example of the great fire of London, which was originally blamed on an innocent party — a Frenchman, Robert Hubert, who was wrongly executed, despite being out of the country at the time of the fire. A rebuilding act for London, in 1666, stopped the practice of cladding buildings in timber. But during the 2000s, there was a change in building practices, driven by a 'green revolution'.
He explained that, in a bid to reduce the consumption of energy, there was a "quiet revolution that allowed us to clad a building which burned in 2017 [Grenfell Tower]." He added that this demonstrates that "we must keep the original learning that we had from an incident and not let that go to waste."
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