5 Reasons You Should Care About A Boring Industry Like Sterile Processing.

The reason we made the title of this blog so self-aware is because just throwing a phrase like Sterile Processing onto social media is pretty likely to ensure no one reads it. But don’t let the name fool you. This stuff is not only important, but very interesting. If you took a time machine back to the 16th century and wrote an essay called On the Importance of Washing Your Hands Before a Procedure, people would have yawned then too.

But imagine what the world would be like if cleanliness was something we continued to dismiss as useless?

Making sure that medical equipment is cleaned properly before each use should be just as universally understood as washing your hands. But it isn’t.

Here’s five reasons you should care about Sterile Processing.

Over 440,000 deaths are caused by medical errors every year

Yea. 440,00.

To put that into perspective for you, that’s like if the entire population of Minneapolis, Minnesota died in one year. There’s not even a way to wrap your mind around that number. Think sterile processing is important now?Now sure, these people already have compromised immune systems that are only compounded by these medical errors. But still, there’s no way to soften that punch.

Nor should there be.

This is a serious issue and one that it’s easy to turn our heads away from. But with numbers like these, we can’t turn our heads away anymore.

The operating room impacts us all

If you’re not in an operating room, you will be eventually. It’s a fact of life. And even though you might not be reading this from a hospital bed, you may be thinking of someone you care about who is. That’s why it’s so important to make sure that equipment is cleaned properly, because it’s one of the few things that really does matter to everyone.

You could get four people in one room who disagree on literally everything, but they would agree on this.

There’s not even a conspiracy movement that we’ve ever heard of (but who knows, maybe there is one) that denies the existence of germs and bacteria. But yet, sterile processing is still a field that doesn’t get nearly enough care and attention.

The employment crisis is only making these problems worse

We’ve all been there. When you’re short-staffed things get sloppy.

A shortcut here and there won’t hurt anything, right? That may be true when you’re a waitress or a stocker at a grocery store. But taking shortcuts in a hospital is how things turn deadly. In a hospital, almost every choice you make is life or death. So imagine what happens when, not just one hospital, but the entire medical industry is short-staffed.

In fact, you don’t have to imagine it. That’s how we get numbers like 440,000 deaths caused by medical errors each year.

The kinds of issues that come when the employment shortage is no longer local and constrained to a couple specific hospitals, but when it becomes a national crisis is something we still cannot fully understand. These problems are still building. So every day being read up on sterile processing becomes more crucial.

Because you won’t have time to get educated on these things after you end up in the hospital

No one plans to visit the ER.

If you get there and begin thinking, “Hey, I read something about some kind of boring processing that might be important to know right now,” it’s too late. This is the best time to study the complex issues related to sterile processing, because right now your life probably doesn’t. But it might, or it might be important for someone you care about very soon.

Caring about sterile processing is like caring about hospital staff washing their hands in the 19th century

Imagine if you overheard a doctor say “Yea, washing your hands isn’t that important.”

We hope that someday, hearing that will be as absurd as hearing someone say “What’s sterile processing?”

These issues don’t seem important until they become commonplace, and once they're commonplace they’re assumed to be the norm.

And that’s okay. We just want to get to the point that ensuring that equipment is cleaned properly before each procedure is assumed to be the norm everywhere.

But there’s still a lot of work to do.