AFFILIAZIONE
esaote spa
AUTORE PRINCIPALE
Dr De Luca Ramona
VALUTA IL CHALLENGE[ratingwidget]
GRUPPO DI LAVORO
Fiesoli Daniele – esaote spa, firenze
Bellavia Simona – esaote spa, firenze
Oliverio Marianna – esaote spa, firenze
Dr De Luca Ramona – esaote spa, firenze
AREA TEMATICA
Innovazione (prodotti e servizi)
ABSTRACT
In recent years, ultrasound (US) imaging has seen a rapid expansion in a wide range of clinical applications and procedures. This tool is frequently used by sonographers, doctors, nurses, and other medical professionals in hospitals, outpatient ambulatory settings and medical offices. This expansion and these diverse areas of sonography emphasize the need for the development, validation and routine management of proper infection prevention and control to protect patient and clinician health, prolong the transducer life, ensure optimized imaging capabilities. This abstract aims to provide education and practices guidelines to meet such requirements, based on regulations and standards.
The US practitioner has a responsibility to ensure that the US probes used are properly reprocessed. Personnel assigned to manage and/or execute probe reprocessing must undergo recurring training and assessment to manage and ensure compliance with reprocessing protocols. To ensure the facility/clinician has the capability and capacity to adequately reprocess the probe, manufacturers provide instructions for reprocessing their specific medical device (MD). Such instructions are developed to comply with regulations and industry guidance. Together with healthcare facilities/personnel and MD manufacturers, the responsibility assignment matrix for appropriate probe reprocessing, includes the manufacturers of cleaning/disinfection/sterilization agents and methods, that certify such products.
This abstract builds upon regulations, standards and technical guidelines and provides a comprehensive set of recommendations that any US practitioners as well as clinical engineers can use to answer probe reprocessing questions or to implement such recommendations.
The COVID-19 (SARS-CoV-2) pandemic in 2020 has highlighted the importance of proper infection prevention and control of all non-disposable MDs used by sonographers. Adequate protocols combined with clear guidelines and staff training allow to control and reduce cross-contamination risks, ensure patients safety and contribute to the quality of their care.
