Nursing

The Central Sterilization Supply Department (CSSD) is an integrated service in hospitals that performs sterilization and other actions on medical devices, equipment, and Supplies. This unit ensures the safe management of decontamination services in healthcare through safe, efficient, effective, and reliable systems. This Department provides complex services, including preparing sterile medical supplies for the operating room and all other units and departments in the Children’s Cancer Hospital Egypt 57357.

The scope of the tasks and responsibilities of CSSD places it as a department that deals with the prevention of nosocomial infections and represents one of the core aspects of comprehensive health care. This department provides specialized hygienic operations (complex pre-sterilization preparation, steam sterilization, plasma sterilization), the output of which is sterile medical supplies. To routinely supply the hospital with all necessary sterile material, the department's management closely cooperates with the leading employees of the operating rooms and inpatient and outpatient clinics. The main aim of the Department of Central Sterile Supply is to guarantee a high quality and level of sterilization for all medical supplies. The protection of all patients is critical to our work.

The Central Sterilization Supply Department comprises five major areas: decontamination and processing, assembly, sterilizing, sterile storage, and distribution.

The objectives of central service include the following:

• Disinfection, mechanical treatment, and manual treatment of all medical supplies in automatic washers with adjustable and controlled parameters. The machine-controlled washing is carried out in a closed system and uses thermal-chemical or thermal disinfection. The quality of pre-sterilization preparation is checked and performed by different indicators.
• Organizing and completing surgical instruments into sets by qualified technicians, as well as medical supplies are packed into special single-use or reusable sterile packs in a qualified manner.
• Visual control of completeness, preparation, and packing of surgery room cloths by preparing and packing the cloths in single-item packs or set packs according to requirements of individual operating rooms or other departments and units all over the hospital.
• Moreover, Plasma sterilization is used for thermo-labile reusable medical supplies (made of plastic). The sterilization medium is a low-temperature plasma created in a high-frequency electromagnetic field that interacts with 58 percent hydrogen peroxide vapors in a high vacuum. Plasma sterilization is a dry sterilization process. All sterilization processes are carried out in modern machines with controlled parameters and written records providing details. Both chemical and biological indicators rigidly monitor all sterilization processes.
• Moist heat or autoclave sterilization is used for metal, porous, hollow, or otherwise thermos-stable medical products. The sterilizing medium is saturated water vapor, which transmits thermal energy by condensing medical supplies. Furthermore, the department employees carry out final inspections using different indicator tests to ensure the quality of sterilization. The department takes care of the delivery of sterile medical supplies.