Manual cleaning prior to mechanical washing should be kept to a minimum. The most crucial factor is selecting the soap, which should be at a neutral PH level. Never use a soap that is not exclusively designed to be for surgical instruments. The manuel washing part is more used to clean lumens, box locks and serrations.
Don’t Use These Soaps on your Surgical Instruments:
-Kitchen sink soaps
-Laundry soaps
-hand scrub for surgeons
-Iodine soap
Cleaning Surgical Instruments using Ultra Sonic Technology:
The best way you can do to clean your surgical equipment is to use ultra sonic technology. This technology removes bioburden very efficiently and its very safe for instruments. The more time you have the surgical instruments in the ultrasonic cleaner, the more clean they’ll become. Never put manuel instrument cleaning soaps in an ultra sonic cleaner and only use a neutral PH level solution.
How to Rinse your Medical Instruments:
After manual washing or ultrasonic cleaning, rinse the medical instruments with h2o, preferably with distilled water. Dont forget to get rid of residue from your surgical instruments after washing it.
Drying of Surgical Instruments:
To avoid water spots on your surgical tools never allow water to dry on it, which will turn into stains.
Lubrication of Surgical Instruments:
after use hinged surgical instruments need lubrication. A machine applied lubrication works best, or even a spray-on lubricant especially for surgery instruments. The most advised are neutral PH lubricants. Mineral based lubricants can never be used as steam, cannot penetrate mineral oils and instruments will not achieve sterility.
Other Surgical Instrument Tips:
-The temperature of tank solution may improve performance with heated solution.
-When you can see bioburden in the tank you should change it. For best results change it daily.
-The longer the surgical instruments are left in the better.
-Do not overload ultrasonic cleaner as this does away with its cleaning efficiency.
-Surgical instruments always are in the open position when placed in the ultrasonic cleaner.