Nancy Chobin, former Vice President of Sterile Processing for Barnabas Health System and a 34-year veteran of the sterile processing industry, provides Informa’s Infection Control Today with a thorough and informative Q&A on the benefits of third party reprocessing.
Nancy Chobin, RN, AAS, ACSP, CSPM
Q: My hospital is implementing a third-party reprocessing program. I am not in support of this. I cannot believe that a company can take a single-use device and make it safe again.  I am all for containing costs but not at the risk of a patient safety. What do you know about this process?
A: Third-party reprocessing is an excellent sustainability project for any healthcare facility. Why? Because we have limited renewable resources, we need to protect the air, water and land we have and our landfills are overloaded with garbage, including medical waste which can seep into groundwater. When the healthcare industry moved to single-use devices (SUD) in the early 1980s no one thought of their impact on the environment. Today, healthcare facilities are dealing with skyrocketing healthcare costs and one way to help with this is a third-party reprocessing program…
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