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Lisa Eddy
Senior Consultant
Many hospitals recently surveyed seem to receive increased findings under the Infection Control standards. We can attribute this to several issues, such as life safety surveyors identifying infection control issues during building inspections, the national patient safety goal infection control initiatives, and the specificity of many infection control standard elements of performance. One EP in particular, under IC.02.02.01 EP 1, the "low level" disinfection issue, requires cleaning and low level disinfection of equipment and supplies. Many hospitals struggle needlessly with how to approach this requirement. A review of CDC recommendations suggests low level disinfection should be used for cleaning of medical equipment and supplies such as stethoscopes, blood pressure cuffs, etc., when the equipment becomes visibly dirty or after contact with a patient in isolation. However, the best way to ensure compliance with this element of performance, is to conduct an organization-wide risk assessment of which equipment falls into the low-level disinfection category and when low level disinfection is really required pursuant to the authoritative source (such as the CDC). With a good, solid risk assessment in hand at time of survey, the organization can feel confident about compliance in this area.
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