Physicians have used reusable flexible bronchoscopes for more than 50 years, but there has been little research on the time required to set up, clean and reprocess them — until now.
Recently, microbial outbreaks and safety concerns led the Association for the Advancement of Medical Instrumentation (AAMI) and the Association of Perioperative Registered Nurses (AORN) to recommend additional steps, potentially extending the time it takes to return scopes to circulation.
In fact, research findings show that the time it takes to reprocess a bronchoscope may be longer than time spent on the procedure itself.
It takes about 49 minutes to set up, clean and reprocess a bronchoscope, according to a study conducted at three university hospitals in the U.S. and recently published in the CHEST Journal. Given the now recommended 10 minutes of forced air drying, the total time to get an endoscope back in use is closer to an hour.
That may mean procedures get delayed and physicians and their patients have to wait.
“The total reprocessing time may be as high as 83 minutes when both possible delays and forced air drying are considered,” the authors wrote. “Further comparative studies are needed to better understand whether a single-use bronchoscopes, can improve efficiency in large volume procedure suites.”
As healthcare facilities face increasing demands and costs, efficiency and identifying resource constraints become more important than ever.
Those are areas where Ambu’s single-use endoscopes can make a significant difference.
Ambu single-use bronchoscopes eliminate the availability issues often seen with reusables, along with the potential risk of cross-contamination. They also never require reprocessing or repairs.
The research examined 14 procedures using 21 reusable flexible bronchoscopes. Monitors tracked preparation, precleaning, transportation to reprocessing, leak testing, manual cleaning, microbial testing, transport to high-level disinfection (HLD) in an automatic endoscope reprocessor (AER), the AER runtime, removal from the AER and endoscope wipe down.
The study’s conclusions were consistent with a reported average time of 76 minutes to reprocess an endoscope, the authors wrote.
“Given the fact that the average time spent reprocessing and drying bronchoscopes was longer than the average procedure duration observed, there is a potential for process bottlenecking unless an additional scope is used in consecutive procedures,” the authors noted.