A Turnover and a Sterilizer Load

In practice

A patient has finished a minor skin procedure, and the room must be ready for the next patient in ten minutes. The medical assistant puts on gloves and starts with sharps and waste. Then she sorts the items by risk. The reusable instruments that entered the skin are critical items, so she rinses them right away to keep blood from drying and sets them aside for cleaning and sterilization. The blood pressure cuff and the exam table touched only intact skin, so they are noncritical. She wipes them with the practice's disinfectant and leaves the surfaces wet for the contact time on the label, rather than wiping them dry at once. Later, she scrubs the instruments with a brush, opening every hinge fully, and packages them with a chemical indicator inside each pack and one on the outside. She loads the table-top sterilizer so that steam can reach every pack. When the cycle ends, she checks the printout for time, temperature and pressure, and she confirms that each outside indicator has changed color. Because this is the practice's weekly testing day, the load also includes a biological indicator, and she logs it according to procedure. She stores the dry packs in a closed cabinet well above the floor.