Paschal Kent, manager of the Hospital Sterile Services Department in Cork, is kept busy supplying sterile instruments to 12 operating theatres.
My job is to manage the Hospital Sterile Services Department (HSSD), which supplies sterile, reusable surgical instruments and medical devices to Cork University Hospital's 12 operating theatres, 13 intensive care beds, 23 clinical wards and departments. It is the only hospital in Ireland that has 12 surgical specialities on site.
One of my main roles is to ensure instruments, devices and dressings are consistently supplied to doctors, surgeons, nurses and other healthcare workers for use in operating theatres and at the bedside.
Our work calls for the highest levels of safety and quality and we must meet requirements set down by European legislation, quality, professional and healthcare standards. In the HSSD, instruments are reprocessed and sterilised under controlled conditions and to agreed specifications.
There are several stages in the sterilising cycle. After a patient is treated, soiled instruments are collected or returned and the decontamination phase begins. Ultrasonic cleaning is required for delicate and hollow instruments used in microsurgery or keyhole surgery. Generally the instruments are pre-cleaned, prepared and run by an automated washer
disinfector machine which passes them through into the clean room.
The instruments are checked for cleanliness. Then they are function tested, oiled if indicated, assembled into sets, packaged, labelled and sterilised in pass-through steam sterilisers.
Following sterilisation, the sets are cooled in the cool room for two hours. Before being released and transferred to the sterile store, a quality check is carried out to make sure there are no tears in the packaging, that there are no wet packs and that set sterilisation parameters have been reached.
If a priority set of instruments is required urgently, the entire process can be fast-tracked and will take four to five hours but usually the whole process will take eight to 12 hours.
All staff in the department must wear personal protective equipment such as gloves, eye protection and gowns. They also must be vaccinated against Hepatitis B.
As well as overseeing the day-to-day management of the department, my typical day involves contacting administrators and healthcare professionals to identify and meet current needs and plan future requirements.
For the past 18 months the department has undergone a major upgrade and expansion to reach established and accredited standards. I have been heavily involved in the planning and implementation of this project. Liaising with builders and tradesmen as well as monitoring that the construction did not contaminate the HSSD environment or its activities was quite challenging at times.
I come from a nursing and midwifery background and I trained in sterilisation and infection control.
The big challenges in this position are to manage change and to keep apace with new technology and innovation but I love a challenge.