International Infection Prevention Week: Why Healthcare Should Understand SPD’s Role

By: David Jagrosse, CRCST CHL

When we talk about infection prevention in healthcare, Sterile Processing should be one of the first departments that comes to mind. Yet, it’s often one of the least understood departments in the hospital.

I’ve spent my career advocating for Sterile Processing because I believe SPD’s work is fundamental to patient safety. Every surgical instrument that reaches the operating room goes through a series of critical processes to ensure it is safe for patient use.

Infection prevention doesn’t begin when the patient enters the operating room. It begins long before that, with the people and processes that prepare the instruments.

How SPD Supports Infection Prevention

Sterile Processing plays a direct role in reducing contamination risk and supporting surgical site infection (SSI) prevention through several critical responsibilities.

  • Cleaning and decontamination: Removing blood, tissue, bioburden, and other contaminants from reusable instruments. Proper cleaning is essential because residual soil can interfere with effective disinfection and sterilization.
  • Inspection and assembly: Ensuring instruments are clean, functional, properly assembled, and suitable for their intended use before they move forward in the process.
  • Sterilization and high-level disinfection: Following validated processes and manufacturers’ instructions for use (IFUs) to ensure reusable devices receive the appropriate level of processing based on their intended use.
  • Monitoring and quality assurance: Using physical monitors, chemical indicators, biological indicators, documentation, and established quality control procedures to verify that sterilization processes are functioning as intended.
  • Storage and distribution: Protecting processed instruments from contamination and package damage until they reach the point of use.
  • Education and competency: Ensuring technicians understand not only how to perform their responsibilities, but why each step matters to patient safety.
  • Collaboration with Infection Prevention: Supporting investigations, identifying processing risks, reviewing practices, and helping establish consistent infection prevention procedures throughout the healthcare organization.

Why Does This Matter?

I’ve always emphasized that Sterile Processing is much more than a department that cleans and sterilizes surgical instruments. SPD is an essential part of the healthcare organization’s infection prevention strategy. A failure in instrument processing can affect far more than one surgical procedure. Depending on the circumstances, it can lead to contaminated instruments reaching patients, surgical delays, instrument recalls, patient notifications, and potentially serious infection risks.

This is why I believe one of the strongest partnerships a healthcare organization can establish is between Sterile Processing and Infection Prevention.

In a previous management role, I helped establish a collaborative program with Infection Prevention that extended oversight beyond the SPD. We identified areas throughout the health system where personnel handled, cleaned, disinfected, or processed reusable instruments and devices.

Together, we developed education, competency expectations, and annual rounding to assess practices and identify improvement opportunities. The goal was to create consistency throughout the organization, regardless of where instrument processing occurred.

The Bigger Picture

Infection Prevention and Sterile Processing bring different expertise to the table, but their objectives are closely aligned.

Infection Prevention focuses on identifying, preventing, and reducing infection risks across the healthcare organization. Sterile Processing provides the specialized technical knowledge necessary to ensure reusable medical devices are properly cleaned, inspected, disinfected, sterilized, and maintained.

Neither department should operate in isolation.

I also believe SPD needs a strong advocate when operational pressures conflict with established processing requirements. Infection Prevention can provide an important independent voice that helps ensure patient safety, standards, and manufacturers’ IFUs remain the priority.

My message is simple: Sterile Processing is not just supporting surgery. Sterile Processing supports infection prevention throughout the healthcare system.

The more healthcare professionals understand that relationship, the better positioned we are to protect patients, strengthen processes, and promote a culture of safety.