The central role of the Sterile Processing Department (SPD) is to decontaminate surgical instruments for patient care procedures. By carefully following cleaning and sterilization protocols for used devices, the SPD plays a critical role in infection prevention. However, not all infectious agents are created equal.

In our blog post last week, we talked about how to take down a bully virus with best practices.  We touched on the relative resistance of different categories of microorganisms to disinfectants and sterilization, and the critical baseline set with the Standard Precautions, where cleaning and disinfection always go hand-in-hand...