Interesting video from our friend Raymond Moore from “CSSD for u”.
Scopes are highly contaminated after use and on top they are complex instruments to clean. We can all agree that a decent manual cleaning, before the disinfection process, is needed to obtain a 100% clean (read: bacteria free) scope. But can we also agree that the AER is the right machine tackle the ‘dirt’, even if the manual cleaning isn’t performed as wished? For us that’s a no. As long as the pre-cleaning steps aren’t performed correctly, the use of an AER remains useless.
Thank god it’s becoming a more widely held belief that manual cleaning poses a threat to the safety of patients as steps can be missed/performed wrong. But what’s next? Hospitals are integrating the AERS more and more for their endoscope reprocessing needs. Some AER even can wash an endoscope, nearly cutting out all the manual reprocessing steps.
Of course, we’re the first to cheer for innovative automatization in medical cleaning devices as it brings many advantages. But there’s a BIG side note: the automatization needs to take us forward. This means that ALL the required steps are handled with the exact precisely and the correct cleaning cycles are respected (such as contact time etc..), without losing efficiency in time. So, is the AER the magic box from the future? We’re not fully convinced yet. But we however do strongly believe in the power of automized pre-cleaning. That’s why we’ve created our Endo device. Curious about your opinions! 🖊🖊🖊
