§ Mr. DuncanTo ask the Secretary of State for Health what(a) instruction or (b) guidelines his Department has (i) issued and (ii) intends to issue to require hospitals to amend the sterilisation procedure for surgical instruments in respect of (a) the temperature and (b) the duration of the autoclave cycle. [59155]
§ Ms JowellThe Department issued guidance on hospital sterilization in "Health Technical Memorandum 2010" and in "Guidance on Decontamination". Copies are available in the Library.
In addition, updated and extended advice was issued in April 1998 by The Advisory Committee on Dangerous Pathogens and The Spongiform Encephalopathy Advisory Committee on handling surgical instruments used on patients known to have, or suspected of having, Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (CJD). Having taken into account the available scientific evidence on both CJD and non variant CJD, this revised guidance recommends disposal of all instruments used on patients with clinical symptoms of any type of CJD. This advice also recommends temperatures and autoclave cycle durations appropriate for use in decontamination processes in certain other situations.
The advice is kept under constant review.