Pre-disinfection-cleaning: crucial steps to guarantee sterilization.

The objective of reprocessing Medical Devices is to achieve an extremely low Safety Assurance Level (SAL) of 10-6, in other words, the acceptance of one non-sterile unit in a million. EN13060, standard for small steam sterilizers, stipulates: ”The survival of a microorganism can be expressed in terms of probability reduced to a very low number…which can never be zero”. This lecture will emphasize how much the fundamental pre-disinfection and cleaning steps contribute to reducing the initial microbial population, and thus achieving the aimed SAL of 10-6. The sterilization phase “alone” is not capable of eliminating an excessive microbial load and reach this goal.

Dr. Christian Stempf, MD, Hygiene Adviser to the W&H Group

Christian Stempf has worked extensively within the European dental industry. He has been involved in infection prevention for 25 years, with focus on reprocessing reusable medical devices, in particular sterilization and design of reprocessing areas.
He has gathered valuable practical knowledge and experience through his daily activities and contacts with healthcare professionals and experts in the field of infection prevention throughout the world.
He is a member of the European (CEN-TC102) normalization committee participating to two working groups i.e. steam sterilizers and thermal washer disinfectors. He co-developed a high-end B-type sterilizer.

Christian offers vendor independent lectures for healthcare professionals as well as comprehensive courses for dental assistants worldwide.

Publications

> Sterilization in modern dentistry: Get it right!
> Cleaning of transmission instruments, what do you expect?
> Fundamental principles in designing reprocessing areas
> Reprocessing Areas - from design to reality