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Over 10,000 packs of instruments a week come into the Hospital Sterilisation and Decontamination Unit (HSDU) for the technicians to process.
HSDU staff provide hospital wards and departments all the equipment and materials needed to carry out clean and sterile procedures on patients.
The trained eye of the technicians enables them to spot damaged items and they have an unrivalled knowledge about thousands of instruments across the whole gambit of clinical fields. They clean, check, sterilise and pack around 450 instrument sets a day.
There’s a doctor with a difference at HSDU playing a crucial role in tracking the journey of an instrument or item used on a patient. Total Documentation or T-Doc is a computerised bar-coding system which gives each soiled or contaminated item coming into HSDU a unique number containing information on who packed, sterilised, despatched and returned the item and where it went when it left HSDU. This system is the first of its kind to be installed in this country.
There are layers of safeguard measures to ensure that what leaves HSDU is ready to re-use and an independent regulatory body makes six monthly checks to ensure procedures are followed to the letter. Every three years the HSDU has to re-qualify for its quality accreditation ISO-9001/2000.
The HSDU, which was purpose built for this specialist task at the RD&E in 1996, provides a round-the-clock service to the 19 operating theatres at the Wonford hospital site including the Princess Elizabeth Orthopaedic Centre, and four theatres at Heavitree. It also serves the hospital Accident and Emergency, outpatients departments and wards in Exeter and the community hospital theatres and health centres including Axminster, Exmouth, Sidmouth, Tiverton, Honiton, Ottery St Mary, Crediton, Chagford and Okehampton.
